


Nobody Son

by hikash0



Series: Six Weary Grackles, Seven Let Us Rest [2]
Category: IT (2017), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Abandonment, Angst, Bill Thinks He's Disposable, Blood, Child Abuse, Child Neglect, Denial, Depression, Disordered Eating, Dreams, Graphic Description of a Tongue Being Bitten Off, Hurt/Comfort, Lost Time, M/M, Martyr Syndrome, Multi, Nightmares, PTSD, Period-Typical Homophobia, Self Depreciating Mentality, Self-Destructive Tendencies, Self-Hatred, Survivor Guilt, antisemitic languange, f-slur, severe emotional neglect and all the resulting trauma that it implies
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-12-28
Updated: 2018-06-05
Packaged: 2019-02-11 12:17:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 21,686
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12935097
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hikash0/pseuds/hikash0
Summary: Bill Denbrough is nothing without his friends. Not a light, not a star in the void, not a stutter in the sound.The slow deterioration of the boy in the blue. Bill is the last It comes for but It calls him home so well.





	1. Bill Denbrough Takes The Blame

**Author's Note:**

> What started as a quick 'Bill has a nightmare' sequence totally got out of hand. Future chapters in the works. Big thanks to Mac (queenjameskirk on A03) for cheering me on as this story spanned more and more pages and my life became consumed.
> 
> Part 7/7 of the Los(V)ers 'crisis' series I'm working on, inspiration struck for Bill after I finished Stan's part (1/7) but before the others, sue me.

 

_He thrusts his fists against the posts but they pass through, he is the ghost. The post is wet with deadwood rot, his name his parents have forgot. His brother dead, friends are the same and all know where to lay the blame._

_\---_

Dust kicks up around his crisp new Keds and the gravel crunches underfoot as they walk home three in a row. Bill and his mother and father properly out as a family for the first time in, a while. Since the previous October really. Bill’s parents took him shopping at Freeza’s today for new clothes to greet the new school year. He’d grown a full two inches. Between school letting out in June, and all of the events of that summer, most of Bill’s old shirts are tight and straining at the seams across his impossibly broadening shoulders. Or in the case of his old jeans and sneakers, inexplicably caked in the muck of all the runoff and sewage Derry had to offer.

'You been playing down by the Barrens?' His father had asked, the very same day in August that Bill returned home. Grime streaked, tear-stained, palm-bleeding, after they fought It.

Bill had crept into the garage, sunset licking gold around the corners of the house, hoping to reach his room unnoticed as he so often did. His father had been sitting there at his workbench and for the first time ever since Georgie’s death Bill wished he would leave. His father was woodwork come to life, tired grey eyes focused on Bill like it was vital that he see him for once, now of all times.

Zack Denbrough’s presence rather than being a comfort, was a jarring adult thing that encroached and invaded, like a too big man stooped in a miniature house. Something horrible, something magical...had happened to the seven of them. Something that could only really survive in the space between the tight-woven promises of children. Bill had felt a strange kind of loss that night after they resurfaced. A piece of himself that could have been Bill’s hope for bringing Georgie home, he’d left it down there in the dark with the bolt gun. In a really messed up way it made Bill want to be with the others, down in the sewers just one more time. As horrible as it had been, for the first time that summer Bill had felt fully complete. All the way alive.

"J-jungle safari, in the b-amb-boo," He had answered his father, stutter already returning.

Zack Denbrough, like he’d been reminded of some sort of cue, blinked back into his tired vague self. His overbright and eyes shifted a little off focus to Bill’s shoulder and he once again passed from daytime father to a moontime ghost of mourning. His father had nodded absently as if he no longer really cared how Bill's shoes had been wrecked, or really even that they had been wrecked at all. Bill had hated him just a little then, as much as a child can ever really hate their parents.

Bill could have died. He’d been ready to suffer worse than that even. Only a baseball swing short of letting his mind go entirely separate from his body. He wondered if his father's expression would have changed if he'd told him that truth.

Sure dad, I was under Derry in the tunnels that swallow even adults. I was lost in mazes of decay with my friends, mentally biting the tongue of a nightmare from the void. Flying through time and past the turtle who spawns galaxies. The turtle who didn’t barely help us. Watching the strings that hold the fabric of our world twang and ricochet, and we all almost died.

Oh and dad? I saw Georgie too. Only he wasn’t my brother, or your son. I shot him dad, he’s dead for sure. No more need to worry about me stealing your maps without asking.

Would his father have woken up then? Finally alive to the risk of losing both his children?

No, probably not. Probably not.

It is the cemetery time of August, only two days to September. The old age of summer bowing out to fall slowly and gracelessly. It is a sleepy time, a lazy time for those who are not children lamenting waning freedom. Bill watches their trio of shadows walk in step before them, the sun sinking behind on the horizon. He aches to reach out to hold his parent’s hands but something in this frightens him. It's absurd Bill knows, but what if they pull their hands away. What if they tell him they don’t want to touch him. That only very little boys hold hands.

Very little boys like Georgie.

Instead Bill moves his arms just so. So that the shadow his hands cast connects with his parents'. There, a perfect trifecta. A patchwork of family that Bill can imagine hides the smaller shadow of his brother, like a baby chick under the wing of a greater bird. Not the horrible bird Mikey had seen. A nice bird, one of Stan’s birds. A Cardinal or Scarlet Tanager, or a great Golden Eagle. Something bright with the light of life in springtime.

Bill thinks on this as they continue to walk, his shadow arms held aloft and at a strange angle to secretly keep connected with that of his parents. He thinks of the Losers and is grateful. Eddie knew, they all did. But Eddie had known Bill the longest. Him and Richie, Stan too, recognized the change in his parents on a profound level Bill could only half-express to the others by way of that wretched, halting parade of aborted syllables. They had been there for the before of it, they saw distinctly the Georgie-like hole eating up the shapes of Bill’s parents as they had once been.

It was as if ghosts had taken up residence in their bodies. Nothing but the pale reflection of warm people, like optical illusions of parents gliding around the house. Once brightly shining twin suns that warmed Bill’s days, now only frigid moons orbiting slowly around each other before spinning away into the black. Sitting in front of the television, glancing at him when he tried to fill up the cold spaces with words. Glancing away when Bill’s stutter made that impossible. Dinners drowned out to the scrape of tableware, knives and forks cutting into silence that seemed to bleed only in Bill’s direction.

Bill’s parents still _bought_ him all that was necessary for a boy of fourteen to survive, but that was more often than not the extent of it. It was up to Bill if he made his school lunch or if he let the vegetables and cold cuts putrefy in the crisper, washed his clothes or not, made sure he scrubbed the dirt from his skin after returning from a particularly vigorous day outside. They had stopped asking after his day, only registered faintly if he came home after dark, no longer bothered about his grades.

And why would they with Bill giving them only A’s, though Bill doubted they would notice a dip in his academic performance of all things. Still his mother used to ask. Bill’s mother used to take an interest in his reports and essays, particularly English. She had loved to read, it was something Bill and her shared. She might leave a book on his bedside, and he would try to finish it as fast as he could. It wasn’t something that happened often but she did it enough that it held a form of regularity in Bill’s memory. He felt as if they were communicating in a secret code only the two of them understood. A code wherein you had to read the story in order to unlock some essential part of the other person.

She had also begun to teach him the piano. On rainy days when he didn’t have the flu and there wasn’t enough water for streams to form and sail paper boats on. When he got tired of Georgie hanging about his room pestering in that way only younger siblings ever can, Bill wandered downstairs to lean on the doorframe to the parlor and watch her fingers dance on ivory and jet. His mother would sit him beside her and show him the scales. Would read aloud the names of notes as she played and Bill would pick up on them. Music was another language, beautifully it was one that didn’t require a stutter-free instrument.

Then Georgie died, and with him Bill’s parent’s turned to ghosts to chase their youngest son, leaving Bill very much alive and thirsting for the feeling of knowing what that truly meant.

Bill is pulled back into the moment by a flicker of dark movement. He tenses, and for an instant a finger of uneasiness strokes up his spine.

But it is only the strange warped dark of his mother and father's shadows moving, and an instant later Bill feels the very real grip of his parent's actual hands grasping his own. He blinks wide-eyed at the trio of shadows, honestly shocked. Now they are holding hands properly, the outline of larger fingers clasped around slender boy ones, starkly visible in silhouette against the dusty road. Old leaves scatter free from the trees in a rustle of wind as they pass McCarron Park.

Bill looks to his left where his mother's fingers encircle his, warm and gentle as if she is cupping a small animal in the palm of her hand. With the way Bill's heart has started to slam inside his bones it might as well be. To his right his father clasps firmly, hand almost double the width of Bill's but with fingers that manage to be soft despite the strength. He looks up at Zack Denbrough and suddenly Bill thinks he might cry. He thinks he might sob on the spot because thank God, thank God they're finally looking at him again.

Bill tears his eyes away with some difficulty. He resolves not to make a big deal of it, and looks back at his feet. The shadows are longer, less stark against the street now that the sun is waning lazily. Fading shadows to match fading grief. Bill barely dares to hope that this excursion somehow signals the start of a vital change. That despite it soon being fall, he and his parents have stepped into some kind of overdue spring thaw.

Held bookended by his parents like this, the wanting in Bill’s heart is fulfilled. He can't help that his eyes prick, the slightest sting of tears unshed. Because Bill, with the help of his friends, destroyed the monster that killed Georgie, and now finally, his parents really are looking at him again. Just like he’d hoped. God, just like he’d prayed, to anyone who was listening. Not the fleeting overbright of his father’s eyes as he stared at Bill’s sewer-grimed clothes in uncomprehending perplexity, not the grief clouded, hair obscured haunt of his mother’s terrifying sadness filling the house like a busted water maine. Real seeing. Clear-eyed, right-to-your-heart seeing.

They continue along Up Mile Hill, passing right through the intersection at Jackson. Faint sounds of a pickup ball game float up from behind the Tracker Brother’s depot. Bill is glad they’re going the long way. They’ll hook left at West Broadway and then back down Witcham Street. This way they won’t pass the storm drain that took Georgie and risk breaking the strange spell of peace that has settled over them. Bill wonders how long it will last. If it will last, or if the grief will leave only to return like waves lapping on the shore. Still, this is a breakthrough and Bill thinks about who he’ll call up to tell first. He’ll tell them all of course, they tell each other everything now, eventually. He thinks he’ll tell Eddie because it will help him worry less, and then Richie because Richie won’t forgive Bill if he loses out to anyone except Eddie. Stan is next but Stan, Bill will tell in person, so he can see a smile break over the almost-adult stillness of his face.

Sharon Denbrough interrupts the companionable silence. His mother’s face is serene, calm and with the barest promise of future wrinkles in all the places her skin has been folded over the course of years, like the crease of a waxed paper boat. Her hair, so much like Bill’s hair, shifts with the light wind. Her blue-green eyes twinkle sleepily and as hazy as the last shimmers of dusk burning away into true night.

“You have another set of speech classes up in Bangor next week,” she informs him, smoothing auburn flyaways from her face with her free hand. Bill’s palms feel sweaty but he doesn’t dare adjust his fingers, for fear that his parents might mistake it as a desire to let go.

“O-o-okay,” He winces a bit, wishing he could get out even one simple word without the echo of it overflowing. His parents don’t say as much but it is clear to Bill that they measure his speech against him by way of determining his well being in other things. His speech classes mean so much to his mother, it’s the only time she ever focuses, ever comes even partially alive.

“What ab-about school? It’s the start of a n-nuh-new term,” Bill doesn't like the idea of not joining his friends on the first day. It throws off their precarious balance of unity if they are separate for too long, with Beverly in Portland it’s more important than ever that they keep the circle. Leaving Derry scares him too, even for one or two days, because Bill starts to Forget.

“We’ll write you a note, it’s not a big deal,” His father says, nonchalant.

“You want your stutter to get better don’t you?” His mother asks, and it’s almost too much for Bill. The way her eyes meet his straight on. He can’t keep the gaze and looks back at the shadow of his family.

“C-course I do,” Of course he does. It only hurts a little when it feels like they are trying to smooth over the flaws in him, rather than to accept that his stutter is a part of him. He’s had it since he was three, that’s eleven years to get used to it.

Sure Bill wants it gone, but he doesn’t exactly hold out hope. Lately the severity of it doesn’t seem to be dependent on how many speech therapy classes he takes. Instead his stutter seems wrapped up in something larger than Bill, an encompassing _other_ force.

Sometimes it’s a prominent part, sometimes faint, but still his stutter is just a part of Bill to be accepted, the way the Losers do. They each have their standout ‘thing’. Eddie’s asthma, Richie’s glasses and trashmouth, Stan’s Jewishness and cleanliness rituals, Ben’s weight, Bev being a girl, Mike’s race. The differences, what the world calls ‘disadvantages’, that set them apart alone are little more than mundane facts when they come together. Sometimes Bill even feels an odd possessiveness over his stutter and a formless resentment that his parents keep insisting it must go away. It feels like they are scrubbing over him, hard and abrasive, trying to erase. Trying desperately to erase.

“I thought we were going to lose you, when that car...” His mother starts, and Bill feels his father’s hand clench momentarily around his. They never talk about the accident when he was three or the head trauma his mother is sure caused Bill’s stutter.

“You were so small and limp in my arms, I thought I’d give anything in the world to make you be okay again,”

Bill keeps his eyes fixedly on his shoes, matches his strides in time to his parent’s longer ones so that now he is doing some awkward loping thing of a step. They walk a little faster and in silence for a while, something tense about it this time.

They keep the Barrens to their right and Bill tells their orientation by feeling. They’re passing the spot, roughly, where the clubhouse sits dug in the ground. A part of Bill whispers _wait._

“I didn’t know It was listening. I didn’t know I’d have to give up Georgie,”

Bill runs the words over in his head. What. That part again, more urgently. _Wait. We’ve passed it. Our street, we’ve passed by it._

“Well, we’re almost here anyhow,”

Bill lifts his head up and looks around. Suddenly as if the three of them have clipped through spacetime, they are much further along than could ever be realistically possible. They were just passing Jackson, now they are striding down Up Mile Hill at a dead shot for the trainyard.

The standpipe looms stark white, memorial fountain sat in the distance behind. Bill looks forward and back again. Now he sees the street sign for Old Lyme stood perpendicular at his back. When he turns his head for the third time they are rushing to meet the intersection of Neibolt and Route 2.

Neibolt Street Church rises up beside him, spiral casting a shadow like a pike. His ears prick and even though Bill knows, he knows in his bones that it’s not a Sunday, he can hear the harmony of voices through the walls of the building. It’s not a hymn or a holy hallelujah, it’s a funeral march.

\---

Bill digs in his heels, scrabbling through dirt and gravel, through small sprouts of witchgrass that lengthen the closer they get. The beginning of the trainyard lot stretches like a ghost to his right, the dead end of the tracks clogged up with piles of lumber, with crooked, ripped up rails and rusted barrels of supplies long since meant for shipping. Things that had surely, by now gone rancid inside. Like the day so fresh just moments ago with the golden sun ripening the horizon, now the blue black bruise of night and encroaching rot of darkness rushing up at Bill.

His mother and father keep the same pace and same route down the street. Bill’s feet drag and trip over each other as he scrabbles to get out of their grip. It’s a futile effort.

“You-your’e h-hu-hurting me,” His voice comes out thin and whining and scared to his own ears. Bill hates it. A hateful, weak, little boy voice and Bill wonders where that booming stutter-free surety he used against Pennywise went. His parents keep advancing. He wriggles and twists his wrists, palms locked up and squeezed so tight between their grown up hands.

“S-s-st-st-hop, s-s-stop yo-your’e h-hu-hurting-”

"It should have been you, William,"

Whatever words Bill means to say shrivel up and get lost over each other, tripping in the echoing void of his brain.

"Instead of George, it should have been you. You do know that, don’t you?"

Oh.

Oh he knows it. He knows but hearing them finally say it out loud is another animal all together. It makes Bill go weak, dizzy in the head. His strength flows out of him.

Bill stops trying to walk at all. His limp feet drag steadily against the dirt street while his parents march along like some military company. Long adult legs striding in perfect time. Bill almost suspended, rather than a child, but like a shared burden between them.

He stares at his mother’s hand, tense, veins prominent through freckled skin from holding the weight of his body aloft. Then to his father who is looking at him as if Bill is not quite right in the head. As if Bill has missed the punchline of a very easy joke.

"You didn't think we were walking past home all this way for nothing did you?" Zack Denbrough admonishes with that overbright blindness in his eyes, the one Bill _hates,_ now an overbright note to his voice.

"We'll give you to our good neighbor Mr. Bob Grey. He'll return Georgie to us," His mother’s determination sends pins and needles of fear into Bill’s blood. He suddenly wants to puke, maybe scream, maybe both.

“He-he-he’s nuh-not th-th-there a-any-any mo-more!” Bill doesn’t know if he means Georgie or Pennywise, both probably. It’s incoherent, panicky. Desperation mounting as every second he fails to get out from his parent’s grip, every inch they come closer to the Neibolt house, Bill can feel his ability to speak in coherent strings of words eroding like unstable sand under the posts of homes on a hill.

It shouldn't scare him but It does. They killed It, he saw It break apart, disintegrate. It’s dead, it’s dead! Why is Bill so scared?

“You’ve had a year to stop stuttering, a year to find him,” His mother again, harsh and cold. Ice and needles in Bill’s bones. Ghosts and haunting, empty, loveless mothers.

“I t-t-tri-trie-,” He fumbles, weakly choking on syllables.

"A trade’s a trade Bill, it's only fair," His dad interrupts, so ambivalent Bill can feel the shrug in his words.

"P-p-p-p-p-puh-p-,"

_Please no._

He whips his head around desperately searching for the others, sure they'll magically appear in his time of need. Searching for his ever-present trail of friends. Loyal loving Losers. Always at his back, always with him when he asks them, when he needs them! And by shit Bill needs them now, now, now!

The sunflowers in the overgrown yard stare at Bill’s struggle with clusters of dried black eyes. The path that flanks the three of them chokes and narrows on witchgrass, the eaves of the sagging roof drown, buckled with the weight of soggy leaves. The broken cellar window and the rotted black patch branded into the roses are all still there. The house has taken his parents eyes, it sees Bill in their place. It wants Bill in their place. Wants to eat him, twist him, crush him. Love him, in its own horrible way.

**Come home Bill.**

A snare to the heart, to the bloody wound in his chest formed the day Bill lost his little brother. A fisherman’s reel cast deep in the ever widening lake of sadness and guilt inside him. Each moment of rejection from his parents a drip to overflow the banks.

His sneakers scuff up the paint chipped stairs and his mind screams.

_PLEASE NO. PLEASE NO. NOT ALONE. NO, NO, NO!_

Zack and Sharon Denbrough swing Bill up, writhing and screaming incoherencies because it is the only sound he can get out without stuttering, over the rotten threshold of the Neibolt house.

Swing him up holding his hands. _Holding his hands!_ Not because they love him or want him with them, but to keep him from running away.

The door groans open and they lift him over slumped foundations into the awaiting arms of Bob Grey.

\---

“Come home Billy,”

Bill finds his words again, a crazed kind of fear tinged with outrage at the unfairness of it all pulls them from his throat.

“N-NO! W-W-WE KUH-KI-KILLED-”

The clown catches him by the face and Bill’s screams are muffled against silk gloves that slide then stick against his sweat matted brow. Bill kicks out with his feet, Keds slapping against the silver clown suit. He also clutches vice-like at his parent’s hands, loath to let go even as they try to pry his fingers from thiers. His efforts are only half effective in both directions.

It grips down on him, painful and crushing and Bill screams again. Bill can feel Its fingers digging into the space between his ribs, not breaking the skin, but hard enough to mottle and mark its future an ugly blue.

He twists despite the pain, he fights as hard as he's ever fought. There's no way, no fucking way he's getting dragged into 29 Neibolt street alone. No way Bill will let his parents give him over. He's going to have a Talking To with them. A sit down fucking dinner, you bet your fur! He's going to get out of this and make them wake up to the fact that Georgie is well and truly dead and that they aren't allowed to keep using it as an excuse to ignore-

Oh but then. Bill sees him. Catches sight of a yellow rain slicker darting out the door right next to him. A tiny ship’s captain, close enough to touch, and Bill’s fingers go slack with the shock and heartbreak of it. His mother and father pluck their hands from his with an almost businesslike neatness.

Just like that, so easily, It has him again. It always gets Bill in the end doesn't It. It tucks Bill under Its arm like a parcel of flesh from the butchers and moves his head so he has a clear view. It wants him to see.

He watches the small shape of Georgie-not Georgie!-Bill reminds himself, reunite with his parents. Watches his mother crouch down smiling, watches his father bracket the two of them in a hug, laughing with joyful tears in his eyes. He watches them come all the way alive and feels it like something-a dam-breaking apart and internally flooding him. The clown releases his face, now It wants him to talk. He hates how seamlessly he plays his part but Bill can’t help it.

“M-mo-om,” Bill’s voice breaks, cracks on the uptake. Imploringly, and impossibly high. It’s a question, it’s a plea. It’s disbelief and despair. Bill’s cheeks feel hot, his eyes sting and there’s that hateful crying iron taste in his throat. He won’t cry, he won’t cry! He’s not a baby and he won’t cry.

“M-m-mom, dad! M-mmm-mom that's nuh-no-ht G-Gu-Georgie!”

It's not. It's not! Oh please God, _please God!_ Why can't they see?

Why can't they see the fibrous rot, the blue green sheen of that thing’s skin, the waterlogged flesh, the mouth leaking leaves and raw sewage, greywater from every pore. All it is is a corpse in a yellow rain slicker and green galoshes.

They don't see. They never see. They’d rather Bill die than have to see him. They’d rather leave him. Leave him with the clown.

Bill feels too much, he can’t form words to talk so instead he screams. Screams after them high and furious. It’s a wounded, howling, insensate sound. Anger. It’s an anger sound. But not the anger of self-righteousness no, Bill’s scream is an anger of deep hurt and it tapers off into bitter, breathless gasping. His ribs ache, his heart _hurts_ , Bill feels so much, always so much feeling and never anywhere for it to go.

“Bye now! Bye! Visit again soon!” It jostles Bill as It waves exaggeratedly from the derelict porch. Its voice is chipper, artificial helium high and bright.

Bill gets a handle on his breathing again because he can’t afford to waste time even if by _God_ his heart feels stabbed, punctured raw by blunt needles. He looks around, for something he can use as a weapon, for someone to call out to. For a familiar face. Come on guys _please_.

“Waiting for your friends?” It sounds pitying, almost genuinely so, and the false concern wracks Bill’s body with shudders.

“They won’t come, Billy boy. It’s just you and me now, and you’re not enough. You’ve never been enough by your lonesome,”

It carries him over the threshold and just like that he’s back inside the Neibolt house. The front door creaks like the squeal of a stuck pig and slams closed against Bill’s back, knocking his head forward, pulling a dull throbbing pain from the back of his skull. Pennywise cocks Its head and almost casually, like they’re old friends catching up after time apart, asks;

“How’s Stan The Man holding up?”

Bill narrows his puffy eyes and chokes out as vicious a ‘Fuck you’ as his stutter will allow. Which is, not very vicious. Bill doesn’t feel very vicious right now, he feels hurt and alone. Bill feels sadness climbing up the walls of his insides and he fights hard against hopelessness.

“Does he still dream about my lights? Still long to be in them?”

Bill struggles angrily. He does not want to dwell on the increasing absence of his friend at their group gatherings.

“Does reality still grate his nerves raw? Does he still bite his little sissy nails all bloody and shaking between teeth?”

Bill does not think about the bulk of bandaids on Stan’s fingers, the length of his hair, longer and more unruly than Bill knows Stan likes it. To hide the circlet bite marks.

“Doesn’t matter,” It says, chipper as a peach.

“I watch over all of you in my own way. I know how Stanley’s doing, how you’re all floating along,”

_He thrusts his fists against the posts and still insists he sees the ghosts._

"He hates you,"

_‘I hate you,’ then a smile, eyes averted to conceal the truth of the statement in a joke._

"You left him, your little lovebird so red and dead in my lights,"

Bill does not think about the silences, the blankness. The deadlight vacancy polluting Stan’s once clear eyes. He doesn’t think about how Stan is shorter tempered with Bill than with the other Losers. How Stan gravitates now closer to Richie, Richie who Stan sided with, Richie who went to Stan’s Bat Mitzvah and had warned Bill that one of them would get caught.

"They won't come for you. They all hate you, and why shouldn't they! You dragged them into this mess. You made them follow you through rivers of shit and piss to fight a monster,"

No, no. They were alright, Richie forgave him. Richie followed him and picked up that baseball bat and beat the shit out of It. Richie saved him, when Bill told him to leave. He didn’t listen, he pressed on and ignored Bill and saved him. Come on Richie. Come on, where are you?

“Stan-o got dirty for you and you leeeeeft him, left him with me!"

_I can deal with being scared. It’s being dirty I can’t stand._

“S-s-stan is bu-buh-better than you!” Bill finally forces out. He has to deny It, he has to.

“Ooh! Is he? Let me tell you a secret. He’s not gonna make it B-B-Big Bill, I saw it in him, why he’s practically a grown up! All that reason stuffed so tight inside his little bones. One day he’s just gonna POP off at the wrists!”

_I'd rather die than be dirty. Rather die than be dirty, rather die than be-_

Shut up, Bill thinks. You shut up you stupid, fucking clown. You don’t know anything about Stan or his strength. You don’t know a thing about any of us half as well as you wish you did. If you did you wouldn’t be scared of us. Scared of me. You wouldn’t be picking us off one by one.

_He thrusts his fists...against the posts and still insists he sees the ghosts._

Say it. You know you have to say it. SAY IT.

“He th-th-thrus-ts-”

“Not today Billy Boy. Not today!” Big and jovial, horrible. Horribly joyful. Bill doesn’t think he’ll ever be able to listen to another faux-happy voice in all his life, not even in the movies.

And the clown. Mr. Bob Grey, Pennywise. Whatever It is. IT. The essential THING. Closes a heavy hand around the back of Bill’s head and, quick as a trapdoor spider, the other hand shoots forward and snatches his tongue mid-sentence. Now Bill couldn’t stutter if he wanted to.

Then, tauntingly. It lets his tongue go. Bill being the stubborn boy that he is, tries again immediately.

“He Th-THRUSTS-”

Bill clamps shut his teeth as It shoots out Its hand again. An expression of mild surprise on Its cake-peeling, sallow, icing-gone-rancid-face. Bill very nearly bites Its hand. He will, he resolves. He will bite Its fucking fingers right off the next time. Better than that. He will say his phrase, his rhyme without even opening his mouth. Bill doesn't know if the rhyme will have the same effectiveness or power, but he’ll still try. By damn he’ll try.

“HE THRUSTS HIS FIST AGAI-ARGHHH!”

It was working, he hadn’t stuttered. Somehow talking through clenched teeth smoothed his stutter away. That is, until It grows one long and pike-like claw of a finger through the silk glove and plunges it into the meat of Bill’s shoulder. It wiggles the finger deeper and deeper into the wound until it hits bone and Bill screams through his teeth, clenching his jaw so tightly he is sure his mouth will shatter. His world goes a blinding white around the edges, then grey and granular, the particles of reality seem to come apart like sand. Like everything is made of heavy sand and interwoven static.

Bill slumps in Its grip, pain and that grey unreality washing over him in waves radiating from the puncture wound in his arm. He is cold, and this time it isn’t merely the negligence of love. This cold is the shock of a wounded prey animal, a paralytic self-protection taken up in the body of a young boy.

Now Bill does cry, big slow drops from stinging eyes that wet his face like hot summer rain. It hurts so bad. He's afraid. He’s afraid, he's afraid! No Richie to pull him out again with his booming Irish Cop voice, no Eddie to tell him that ‘It's just a fucking clown!’ and spray It with battery acid. No Beverley to cave Its head in with a deadshot arm and a silver slug. No Mike, bolt gun holstered at his side like the hero of a great Western picture. No Ben, taking the brunt of claws and knives and rocks, of Henry Bower’s fists and getting up stronger. Every. Single. Time. No Stan. Stan with his beautiful bird book. Stan contorting himself against his naturally straight edges, bending so very far to accommodate the unreality Bill asked him to fight.

Bill only has himself and his speech impediment, only has that tongue twister now with his tongue so twisted he can’t get it out.

He pants with the exertion of staying awake. He knows if he drifts off now he’s as good as dead. It will peel his eyes open and cast him into the deadlights. It will smash his mind to pieces against the barrier of that ‘other’ place. Bill can’t beat It, not like this. Alone and really, truly afraid for the first time since the night Georgie went missing. But maybe Bill can stay coherent long enough to lurch out of Its grip and run. If he can get to the basement and jam up the door maybe he can buy himself enough time to claw up the coal heap and squeeze out the window again, just like last time.

Then he’ll run. Run all the way to the clubhouse, all the way to the others where Bill will be able to become something again. Backed by the others with younger children to protect, he’ll remember how to be something with value and a proper reason to keep fighting.

Suddenly, as if sensing his intent to struggle, to fight for escape, It moves in close, so close. Enough that Bill can see the waterline of Its eyes and the border of pale white lashes glopped together with some kind of putrid mucus that overruns onto the caked on grease paint.

“You're all alone Billy,” It gurgles, sounding a low growl in a throat full of spit, or worse.

“Billyyy,”

“Biiiiilllyyyy,”

It wrenches Its finger from Bill’s arm and he gasps stupidly, the pain making him blind. He feels warm blood, hot and sticky, seep out from the wound and slide heavy and lazily down his arm. That greyness threatens to overtake him once more.

“BiiiiilleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeEEEEEEEEEE,”

The sound crescendos to a screeching chirruping racket the likes of which a human throat could never make and which when heard with human ears causes Bill to scream outright. He can no more stop his mouth screaming than he can willingly stop his heart beating, or the synapses in his brain firing.

It opens Its mouth to match his scream, and Bill expects It to cast him into the deadlights. Too late Bill realizes that It is closing the distance between them, that Its face is mashing up and splitting apart, that Its teeth have now become hundreds of yellow, gore-caked scythes erupting from Its gums. Too late for Bill to close his mouth and retreat his exposed tongue behind the safe barrier of scattered baby teeth among the adult ivories.

It takes a hold of him, not by Bill’s mental tongue but his physical one. Still making that insane noise, that skull-splitting, resounding deadlight sound, the sound of the void. It takes Bill’s tongue between those yellow scythe teeth, sinks them through as easy as butter, and bites it off.

There's a sickening pull and a pressure before the pain. Blood gouts out over Bill’s chin and down his front. Warm and sticky and bubbling up with his increasingly frantic screams. Bill Denbrough looks with disbelieving insanity into Its yellow-silver horrible eyes and watches as It chews and swallows with a smile to shut Bill up for good.

 


	2. Bill Denbrough, Blue All the Way Down

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> On the edge of, seventeen, on the edge of a great fall, on the edge of letting himself be nothing at all. Bill insists he's fine, the others start to worry otherwise.

_The world has brought you down upon yourself, you have not been kind. If you acted as your friend, you'd have more peace of mind._

_\---_

“Two inches taller and...six pounds lighter than before,”

Bill snorts laughter out of his nose as he steps from the scale. He stops however, when he sees Eddie’s pinched expression.

“Wh-what?” He asks,

“Bill…” Eddie says, voice thin with unhappiness.

“What?” Bill asks again. He puts a laugh into it, cocks his head and smiles warmly down to try and put Eddie at ease.

It doesn’t work. Instead Eddie looks at the clipboard in his arms, dark eyes darting back and forth across the stats, eyebrows drawing down and then up, down and then up. His gaze shifts to Bill reproachfully, he drums his fingers on the cheap particle board like a doctor handling a woefully uncooperative patient.

“You keep losing weight,” He finally says.

Bill blinks down at him. For some reason Bill also looks around, expecting an audience or something. He feels like Richie, desperate to crack a joke and get a laugh, deflect. Deflect. Smile Eddie dammit, smile. Look at me like I’m enough to make it all okay.

“S-so?”

“You're all sharp here,”

Eddie lifts a hand up and reaches out just short of Bill’s cheekbones. They don't let touch linger here, the two of them, not exposed under the harsh gymnasium lights at Derry High School. At seventeen Bill’s aura of natural charisma has only grown and it keeps him, if not exactly safe from harassment, then at least in some kind of begrudged social blind spot. Eddie on the other hand, still short, still smaller than most, inhaler ever in hand and sporting too tight clothes because Sonia Kaspbrak seems to be trying to refuse the fact of his looming adulthood, is Derry High School's preferred target practice.

Of course the Bowers gang is gone, vanished like so many others, and the rest of the bigots lack their exceptional dedication to violence. There’s also the fact that anyone who fucks with Eddie gets a face full of wrathful, spitting, stuttering Bill Denbrough. But even that doesn’t completely stop the spread of rumors of queerness by association. This semester every boy in the Losers Club with the mysterious exception of Bill has run up against the ugly underbelly of small town adolescent homophobia.

“Fast m-metabolism, like a wuh-weed,”

Eddie drops his gaze to the chart again and Bill can read the worry scribbling over his forehead and eyes. It makes him look full grown, like a man with a job and taxes to file, and too many burdens to shoulder. It's not a look Bill likes to see on anyone, much less Eddie.

“Bill, we weigh the same within a five pound margin, I’m already skinny for my age and you’re almost a foot taller than me,”

Bill makes a noncommittal noise in the back of his throat and shrugs. He steps off the scale just as their gym teacher blows his shrill whistle and tells them all to hit the showers.

Eddie frowns after him all the way into the change room and beyond that. In the shower Eddie keeps trying to look _through_ Bill to some kind of sudden truth. Like he hasn’t seen him in nothing but briefs at the quarry a million times, to gauge if Bill’s thinness really is a product of biology or something quieter, worth more worrying. It’s driving Bill up the wall. He loves Eddie, he really does. But he was having a nice, stupid, forgettable morning in his nice, stupid, forgettable gym class and now Bill is plagued with an uneasiness only ever inspired by the worry of his friends in relation to himself.

Jesus, he doesn’t want to bother about it.

Truthfully, Bill doesn’t bother about meals either. It's not on purpose, really. It's just not high on his priority list. There are more important things to focus on than following the food triangle. Unless Bill is expected to cook for someone else, making food is just a drain. It leaves him tired and empty to put so much effort into something for only one person.

The food doesn’t taste like anything, and it’s hard to get down. Plus then he has to clean up after himself and the look of the kitchen, spotless like no one was even there, like Bill couldn’t leave a mark of his existence if he tried, it...feels worse than prolonging his hunger.

Energy bars are quick and easy, he doesn’t have to think, and they have all the nutritional information on the back. So sue him if Bill doesn’t exactly take the time to read it. Three or so a day is supposed to fulfill his daily requirements, they’re meal substitutes aren’t they?

At any rate Bill is fine.

He doesn’t like to think about it but it had been a gradual thing, Bill’s parents taking meals in their room. Just as gradual as the emptying of the pantry and the fridge. Three years later, unless he’s bought groceries for himself, Bill doesn’t check anymore. He knows there will be nothing but stale spices, expired preserves, a battered box of arm and hammer baking soda that has taken on three years the smell of the house.

Bill doesn’t blame them, it makes sense when he thinks about it. That they would resent the empty dining room chair that screams ‘look where your dead little boy used to sit!’ and shy away from Bill’s clunking attempts at conversation. Hell, Bill can barely stand to listen to himself choke out words sometimes.

Sometimes, if his parents order too much takeout, they leave Bill a serving. Bill eats it standing up at the counter next to the microwave. Even if it tastes like afterthought, Bill will take what he can get. Mostly though they mind their food and Bill minds his. He's almost an adult at this point, no one’s going to hold his hand through life, he’ll be going off to college in a year.

Bill is more than happy having whatever instant food he gets to buying at Center Street Drug, really. Sometimes he buys eggs and pancake mix, butter and that ‘fake syrup’ so Mikey calls it, most of the time instant noodles serve him well enough.

It’s seriously not a big deal. It’s not that Bill is trying to go hungry or anything, it’s just that, at least this brand of clenching emptiness has a clear _reason_. Sometimes he just needs a concrete reason for feeling the way he does. Besides, he hasn’t had an appetite lately, it makes him sick to eat too much. Especially on days when he wakes queasy from some bad dream, and there have been many lately. Forgotten the moment his eyes open, but of which the feeling he carries with him all the way to first period.

“Aw Eds, come on, it’s just a guh-growth spurt,” Bill tells him after the third worried look Eddie has given his visible ribs.

Eddie doesn’t look convinced, and it’s worth any amount of stomach pain to ease even a fraction of his friend’s anxiety, so after PE Bill makes sure to pile his tray at lunch. Stan and Richie make room for him between them and Eddie not so subtly watches Bill from across the table as he deliberately clears the platter. It’s cornbread, mashed potatoes and some kind of beef stroganoff with a pallid serving of steamed baby carrots. He drinks 1% milk through a straw.

The lunch ladies like Bill, he doesn’t jostle in line, complain, or make disgusted faces when they dole out the goods. He smiles quietly and entertains polite conversation with them, so when his turn comes they make it a point to give him the just-made slop. It doesn’t taste all that different from the bottom of the barrel slop, but at least it’s hot rather than lukewarm.

Stan eats a neat and healthy-looking home packed lunch on Bill’s right and Richie, with his own chaotic charm, has somehow convinced the lunch ladies to give him nothing but several servings of cornbread and chocolate milk. Bill grins innocently at Eddie when he’s done and Eddie narrows his eyes. Bill doubts this is the last he’ll hear about it but for now at least, Eddie looks satisfied.

Ben and Mike join them, they've been attached at the hip since school started what with Mike dividing his time between football practice and his assistant librarian position, and Ben already living at the library, coupled with a sudden and kind of concerning desire to get fit.

“I keep telling you you don’t need to torture yourself with rabbit food. Switch to lifting and try out for the football team, you can eat whatever you want as long as you do the right exercise, you can’t build muscle with long distance running,” Mike says as he pulls out a chair for Ben and then himself.

Ben snorts and gives Mike a look that tells Bill they’ve had this conversation before. His lunch is a sparse looking salad from home and a 16oz bottle of what looks like lemon water with, chilli powder? Mike is doing this thing called carb loading.

“I get enough flack from my mom about how I eat, I don’t need it from you too, besides I don’t have money for weights or any interest in football,”

“Come help out at my place a couple times a week then. Lots of lifting, and my mom’ll make dinner after, it’s good food Ben. You’re gonna waste away at this rate, your focus at school will suffer, your sleep, all the stuff that comes with eating right,”

Ben furrows his brow, a sign that he’s considering it.

“Maybe…”

“But you have to eat _all_ of what my mom puts on your plate, that’s just respect,” Mike tells him, leaning in with wide eyes and a serious face.

“I don’t even get why you wanna be a string bean Haystack,”

“Easy for you to say Richie, you can eat garbage and lay around all day and you _lose_ weight,”

“I am but God’s perfect creation, you mortals need not compare yourselves,” Richie waves a big hand in Ben’s direction like a monarch dismissing a subject.

“You and me are built different, we’re never gonna be twiggy. You have to work with your natural frame, not against it, it's not healthy,” Mike adds on.

Bill raises an eyebrow at Eddie as if to say ‘See? Metabolism.’ Eddie gives him a suffering look.

“You guys are all fucking skinny, and Mike is ripped like Adonis, his abs have abs! I don’t want to hear any more food commentary!”

“Must be getting pretty close and personal with those abs then,” Stan shoots quietly, the corner of his mouth curling up.

“Ooooh! Caught out by Stanley the Manley Uris! Mike, Ben, when’s the wedding!”

Richie extends his hand above Bill’s head for Stan to high five and this is one of the rare instances that Stan indulges him. The slap rings loud in the cafeteria along with everyone’s laughter, even Eddie snickers a little.

“Beep Beep Richie,” Mike says in good humor. Ben’s ears are pink.

\---

Towards the end of third period, which is Trigonometry with Stan, Bill’s stomach cramps so badly that his knuckles go white on his pencil and a hairline fracture splits the wood along its length. He looks at the clock, suddenly sweating down the back of his neck and shoulders. Bill’s body alternates between freezing and too warm, lunch is a ball of cement in his gut.

Seven minutes. Hold out Seven minutes. Slowly and painfully, breathing deep through his nose to hold back the urge to empty his guts, Bill stows his notebook and pencils in his bag. He’s grateful that their unit test isn’t until next week because he’s out of his seat and bum rushing for the bathroom before the bell has stopped ringing. Whatever last minute revision assignments Mrs. Dubois gives he can have Stan tell him.

Bill leans against the scuffed stall wall, feeling light headed and disgusting, albeit over the worst of his sick. He wipes his mouth a few more times for good measure and breathes deep. The sound of other kids taking a piss or talking at the sink as they wash their hands, and the echo of shoes squeaking in the hall outside only make Bill feel more self-conscious.  

He hears a gentle tapping on the outside of the stall and Stan’s low voice.

“Bill, are you okay?”

“Ugh, gre-great as I’ve ev-ever been,”

He gets a dry laugh at that and smiles to himself.

“You don’t have any gu-gum do you?”

There’s a pause and Stan’s clean loafers shift against the scummy tile floor. Bill focuses on those and the coolness of the stall door pressed up against the side of his face. He’s feeling better now, but still weak.

A moment later Stan’s hand appears crooked over the top of the stall, two sticks of mint gum held between slender fingers. Bill takes a quick second to inspect Stan’s nails and cuticles, they’re trimmed but not overly so and the skin around the nail is maintained but not pushed back too far or bitten bloody.

“Thanks,”

Stan's fingers make a silent ‘OK’ sign, then he stretches them out in a telegraphed wiggle for Bill to take.

Bill hooks a clammy finger in Stan’s and rests his forehead against his friends digits.

“Don’t tell Eh-Eddie okay?”

“Bill…”

“He’s been suh-so wound up around me lu-lately,”

“Does he have a reason to be?”

Fuck. Leave it to Stan to be nosy. Bill immediately feels bad for thinking it, Stan’s only looking out for him. That makes Bill feel worse though, that he’s broadcasting weird signals loud enough for the others to sit up and take notice. Stupid, attention seeking when nothing is wrong, how pathetic is he?

“There was pr-pobably just something off with lunch, muh-maybe the milk was ehe-expired, you know how sh-shit the food is here,”

“You gonna piss, ‘ _Urine?’_ Or you just gonna stand there making out with the door?”

A deep voice thick with a sneer cuts in from the entrance to the bathroom.

“I don’t know Moose, you jealous? Waiting for a turn?”

“Faggot,”

“At least I’m not inbred,”

“I don't know what that means _Jew_ , but it sounds like the next thing you’ll be kissing is my fist,”

Bill lets go of Stan’s fingers and unlocks the stall door quickly. He steps out of the stall to square off next to Stan and stares at Moose without a word.

He sees how Moose draws back and it gives Bill the confidence he needs to convert all of his anxiety and annoyance from that morning into anger. He pretends his eyes are burning smoking holes into the other boy’s skull. _Boil his brain, boil his tiny idiot brain._ Moose blinks stupidly, almost as if he can feel the burn of Bill’s intent. The bell rings and the overgrown boy makes a swift and silent retreat.

Stan looks at the empty doorway thoughtfully before sliding Bill a suffering look out of the corner of his eye.

“I could have taken him you know, you don't have to fight all my battles,”

“I know, but I like fu-fighting your battles,”

Stan huffs a laugh and shakes his head as they make their way from the bathroom.

“So chivalrous. I hate that about you,”

“You love it,”

“No, it’s quite literally your worst quality,”

It's Bill’s turn to laugh as they part ways for their next class.

\---

Fourth Period is blessed, blessed English. Bill has it with Ben and they each pull out their composition notebooks. Their current unit is Bill’s favorite, fiction. He’s good at essays but they hold no personal delight. Not like the freeing feeling of letting a story pour out of him.

“What are you going to write about?” Ben asks him.

For a reason Bill can’t explain he says,“Turtle?”

Ben nods and for a moment there is an understanding in his eyes that makes an electric current run down Bill’s spine. Then Ben shrugs and the look is gone. They both get to work.

It feels like water. Writing, it feels like water flowing cool and clear over Bill’s shoulders, dripping down his elbows and the underside of his wrists. Like the moment in air before, and again just after he hits the pure blue of the quarry. It’s a thrill and a trance inking out the blocks of letters, the arrangement of words that pulls his mind deep under, deeper and deeper into his stories. Bill pens at the page and then bites at the nib of his pen. He repeats this motion over the course of the hour and by the end he has something like an outline for a short story. The side of his mouth and all of his tongue is also visibly blue, so back at his locker Richie aggressively sticks his finger in Bill’s mouth.

“Krikey! A blue-tongued skink! What a beaut’ what a beaut!” He lays on a thick and ugly Australian accent,

Bill jerks his head back, laughing at swatting at Richie. Richie fishhooks his finger so as not to lose his grip and follows Bill all the way back into the lockers where BIll’s back smacks against a padlock and he accidentally elbows Ben.

“S-sthorry Ben,”

Richie, still with his finger fishhooked in Bill’s mouth, now uses the other hand to try and pry open Bill’s jaw to get a better look at his tongue, and marvels at it like he’s some science pet freakshow.

“A perfect specimen if I don’t say so mate, and I do! Blue all the way down!”

“Stop it y-you qu-uh-quack!”

Bill slaps Richie’s hand from his mouth and begins pretend-retching, acting as though he’s spitting out something very foul.

“Oh gross! I saw you playing with your greasy hair all morning, Bill’s gonna get sick,” Eddie rummages in his fanny pack and pulls out what Bill knows from experience is vitamin C infused zinc. He takes them wordlessly from Eddie and pops two 500mg discs into his mouth. They’re the chewable kind, this he also knows from experience. He doesn’t miss how Eddie preens a little with the satisfaction of feeding Bill something, even just vitamins.

“My hair ain’t greasy mate, that’s the natural wind-swept wave of the great Australian Outback! Krikey, were ya raised by Wallababies?”

“I can see the shine from here,” Stan’s dry voice cuts in from across the hall.

He walks deftly through the sea of students hastily shoving backpacks into lockers and rushing to their extracurriculars. Stan grew up tall, his good posture only accentuates the fact. He has adopted a walk filled with purpose and a sharpness to his eyes that deters their peers from getting too close. Though kids run and shove at each other on their way, they never bump into Stan anymore, deliberately or by accident.  

Richie would be one of those kids running with the current, hurrying to extracurriculars, except he got suspended from the AV club on account of a little stunt he pulled during morning announcements a few weeks prior. He’s not too sore about it though since he’s just landed a part time job as a late night DJ at the record store near the pawn shop.

“You wound me Stanley, you really do wound me!” Richie puts a large spindly hand to his chest, his thinness in proportion to his height has become even more exaggerated this year. Now he towers over everyone except Mike and lords it over all of them. It’s downright comical when he stands next to Eddie. His limbs are as unruly and gawky as his hair is curly, his hips small, ass flat as a board, and his shoulders narrower than Bill or Stan’s.  

He makes a show of staggering like he’s been run through, reaching for Stan like Mercutio for Romeo. Stanley huffs a breath and pushes past him dismissively to make a beeline for Bill. Richie whines to Eddie that Stanley doesn’t love him at all and collapses dramatically into his arms.

“I hath been slain of love!” Richie announces, Eddie holds him up out of instinct then needles him in the side with an open-palmed jab.

“Richie shut up!” Eddie exclaims as he tries to get out from under the mass of ragdoll limbs.

“What did you write today Bill?” Stan asks, genuinely interested, fingers already reaching for permission to see. Bill’s fingers tighten on his composition notebook and he slides it sheepishly behind his back, not because he’s shy or anything but because in that moment when he tries to remember the contents of the outline, he honestly can’t.

Something, there was something about a…shit, he doesn’t know anymore.

And it worries him, it _worries_ him. It turns the innocent black and white speckled composition book into an unknown threat and Bill recognizes with a start that he’s afraid of his own story. He can’t show it to the others, not until he double checks that it’s _safe_. That he didn’t write something about gurgling drains or crawling down slick black tunnels that get narrower and narrower, narrower and narrower until the boy in the story starts to twist his arms up inside of himself. Starts to crunch up his spine into his ribs all the way to his skull and collapse his legs into hip bones, and all the while he just keeps advancing and the tunnel gets narrower and narrower still.

“It’s nu-not finished yet, I’ll sh-sh-show you when I’m done,”

Stan’s fingers hover in the air for a second longer than is natural. His brown eyes flick up to Bill’s and Bill holds his breath, praying that Stan won’t say anything to draw the attention of the others.

Stan withdraws his hand and tucks his fingers into the belt loops of his pressed slacks. His eyebrows are drawn down slightly but the rest of his face is a carefully neutral arrangement.

Bill turns down Ben’s invitation to join him at the library to hang with Mike. He also turns down Richie, Eddie and Stan’s suggestion to hit the arcade. Eddie isn’t a fan of the ruckus and inevitable germs coating the sticky joysticks but Stan and Richie are in a heated marathon match of Street Fighter that’s been going for three days. The stakes are interesting, if Richie loses he has to dress formally at school for a week, in clothes picked out by Stan. Eddie wouldn’t miss out even if it meant facing all the deadly germs the government scientists keep in that secret lab in the Arctic.

They exit Derry High and are all loading up onto their bikes. Mike is the only one with a car, a pickup he uses to bring produce back and forth to town on Sundays, but him and Ben are going to jog to the library together. Mike has football practice from five to seven so he leaves his car at school.

Richie hops on his bike and Eddie sets up to ride double behind him. His Ma is being crazy unreasonable again and keeping his own ride “stored for the winter” despite it being only October. They could liberate her easily, just cut the chain, but that’s a fight Eddie wants to save for later, they’ve been butting heads too much as it is. Besides it’s obvious that Richie thrives on chauffeuring the other boy around. For his part Richie gives Bill a last questioning look that Bill waves off. He flips up his composition book,

“I’m on a ruh-roll, wanna get this s-s-story finished tonight if I ca-an, stop by my place later?”

“After the show? It’s my first! You better tune in Big Bill,”

“I w-won’t cuh-call,” Bill gestures to his mouth to indicate how much of a nightmare his stutter would be. “But I’ll be listening, pruh-promise,”

Richie nods, pushing the thick frames of his glasses up the bridge of his nose. He seems placated, pleased even. Eddie’s frown is back though and Stan looks at Bill with more intensity than ever.

Bill grins at them and waves as he leaves them on the steps of Derry High. He still feels a little weak from the strain of expelling his lunch so he walks Silver beside him rather than riding her.

He really does mean to go right home, to check his composition, to write something safer if he finds that his hand has strayed. His feet it seems, have other plans.

One minute he’s headed down Witcham with every intention to go home, the next he’s passing it by. Feeling vaguely ill, feeling...vague, he grips Silver’s handlebars tightly and stares down at his feet. These days he’s traded Keds for a more trendy pair of Converse, bright red and a size ten. Bill walks and walks, he watches the dust under his lone shadow and walks, counts the rotations of Silver’s wheels by the rhythmic fffrt-thwap fffrt-thwap of the playing cards, and walks, he grinds his teeth in concentration of something he can not place, and walks. Bill walks, and stops. Hands suddenly empty, the quality of his steps changed with the new ground under red shoes.

Bill barely realizes where he is or that he’s let Silver drop carelessly in the middle of the street behind him. He looks up. At that fateful, horrible, only just-now remembered house, and Bill’s whole world starts to feel somehow like a very detailed underwater dream.


	3. Bill Denbrough, Song of Silence

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bill's return to Neibolt house is interrupted. Where there was dread he finds comfort in normality, peace in noise where silence dwelled before, against his instinct he chances the solace offered by relying on friends. Bill sleeps easy just the once.

_A bird that makes no sound, never called upon to sing, never preen upon the wing, of downy feathers weighted heavy with the song of silence._

_\---_

Bill stands outside 29 Neibolt street, caught by a feeling that for all his vocabulary he can put no words to. There is a hunger waiting for him just beyond the door, Bill can feel it real as the sun beating down on his neck and the whisper of something Stanley said a long time ago, back when they still had a chance to pretend what was happening to them wasn’t really. Wind whistles through the trainyard, rustling the long witchgrass and the ripening sunflowers. It’s almost an anniversary.

**Come home Bill.**

He closes his eyes, suddenly struck with the urge to howl, there’s a terrible pulling at the epicenter of his chest, a vast expanse that Bill has always found bereft of some essential human emotion. The house plucks at the core of that hole, all tangled fishing lure and deeply embedded hooks. Bill takes an unsteady step forward, just one. The pressure inside him increases, Bill thinks he really might howl, he’s sure it would be a high, wounded-animal sound.

It calls him to answer, to step away from the outside world and accept whatever just barely forgotten thing is in that house with open arms. No. Not so forgotten anymore. Bill does remember what they did as the shape of the details of It and that summer come into sharp relief.

Of course It was never permanently forgotten, not as long as the seven of them stayed in Derry. Just masked for a little while so they could all survive their painful growth spurts, mortifying puberty and the crushing stress of adolescence for a few uneasy years.

There had been sharp reminders down the road, oh yes. Stan’s crisis, and each of the others after him, each grappling their internal demons. They’d come together, overcome, and then forgotten. Things so important, peeled from their minds. Ben and his ice cold winter...Eddie and those three terrifying weeks of confinement at the start of the summer of 1990 during which Mrs. Kaspbrak peaked and showed her most dangerous side. How the fuck could Bill forget? He’d thought he was going to lose Eds.

Bill wonders why now, why is It coming forward and calling him now? Making it seem like It is back. It should be dead, so dead. If not dead It should be hurting bad. Starving, sleeping for another 24 years at least.

“William? What are you doing all the way out here?”

Bill is shocked from his trance and looks down. He realizes that his hand is barely an inch away from the post of the chain link fence that borders the Neibolt yard. He draws it back slowly, slowly as if the house is an animal that will lunge and snap. His hands do not shake but he feels that same magnetic attraction, wrapped up in a primal revulsion.

He turns to look over his shoulder and sees Donnie Uris, Stan’s dad, blinking at him in surprise from behind the wheel of a tan sedan. The image is so quintessentially fatherly that Bill feels as if he’s slid into a movie picture. From dream to movie, something inside him whispers.

“You shouldn’t leave your bike in the middle of the road, I almost flattened it,”

Bill looks on without saying a word. As he stares at Stanley’s father, hair cropped short to tame the curls he’s passed on to his son, the hold of the Neibolt house loosens a bit.

“Bill? Are you alright?”

Bill nods. Donnie’s lips purse into a flat line and he observes Bill thoughtfully. Then he says,

“I’m on my way to the Hanlon’s to swap some Halva for fresh milk and sweet potato pie. Come along with me?”

Bill still feels vague as he loads Silver in the back and gets in the passenger side of the 1970’s Austin Allegro. The drive is quiet, Bill looks out the window at the passing trees and feels Rabbi Uris’ eyes on him periodically.

“What were you doing out there by yourself?”

“I th-thought I saw a dog,” Bill lies, smoothly and without moving his eyes from the window. The call is waning but it’s still there, a thread tying him to Neibolt. Bill imagines scissors in his hands by which to cut the worrying knot of fishing line.

“Oh? Should we get in touch with the shelter up in Bangor and have someone check it out?”

“No, I don't think so. In the end it was just a ruh-really big rat,”

“A rat, I see,”

Bill wonders if Mr. Uris does see. Is it in the way Stan sees? Or the way that all Derry adults do, with some blurry film clouding their hearts and minds. What does it mean if after three years Bill is starting to understand, even find a morbid comfort in this...neglect. This selective blindness. Must it mean that Bill is growing up, becoming that most dreaded thing, an adult?

What does it mean when at seventeen his bones ache with the call of sleep he can never follow, and the idea of all the years ahead of him makes Bill want to weep with exhaustion, rather than joy for the future he claimed back from It in the summer of 1989.

They round the bend on the dirt road and the Hanlon farmhouse comes into view. Bill has been here many times before but never in the absence of Mike. Now the sudden prospect of occupying the space of not simply one, but three adults, creeps over Bill like the thaw of snow slid down the back of ankles when shoes aren’t tied tight and pants come untucked from socks.

Three adults, _Derry_ adults.

It’s a horrible and wretched thought. One Bill has no right to be thinking about lovely people like the Hanlons and Mr. Uris. They’ve never been anything but kind to Bill, never anything short of genuine and warm, welcoming him into their home at every opportunity. And yet Bill’s mind calls to evidence every moment he has been truly alone with grown ups.

Every vacant greif flooded stare his mother has ever given him, each distracted dismissal his father has ever waved Bill’s way with his large engineers hands, or his exasperated deadpan eyes when Bill makes too much of a fuss to be easily brushed aside. Bill thinks of these things and Bill suddenly dreads.

Jesse and Will Hanlon open the door with exclamations of ‘Donnie! You’re late,’ and ‘Bill, what a nice surprise!’

Mrs. Hanlon takes one look at Bill, exclaims about his height, and declares him far too thin. It makes Bill uneasy right off the bat. Everyone is commenting on it. He wants to relax into the hold of her warm comforting hug but he is reminded of Eddie, counting his ribs with upset eyes, and can’t help the paranoid thought that Mrs. Hanlon might be doing the same with the gentle press of her palms against his back.

God. Why is he so on edge? This isn’t like him.

“Don’t your parents feed you, Bill?” They joke.

“I’m guh-growing, can’t fuh-fill me fast enough,” Bill jokes back, but it’s less funny when he’s had to use the same line twice in as many days. When the answer to that question is _no, no, no._ Do not feed, do not speak to, do not look at. Soon enough they’ll ask him what’s wrong. Their annoyance at why he’s being so blaringly strange, difficult and different in a way that’s too hard to ignore, will show through their tone and Bill won’t-

“We’ll fix that, just wait a minute I’ll get you a big slice of pie. Donnie, coffee? Usual black with honey?”

“You know me so well. I can’t stay long though I have to get back home to help Andrea with dinner,”

“I put on a fresh pot when you called, be right back,”

Bill’s brain trips up at that, and for a moment launches all the swirling anxieties right out the window. For some reason it’s such a weird concept and yet, it makes perfect sense.

“H-honey in coffee?”

Mr. Uris nods sagely, “I’m a convert, dissolves better than sugar since it’s liquid and let me tell you Will and Jesse keep the best behaved Bees in all of Maine, gives it a special flavor too,”

“You k-ku-keep b-bees?” Bill turns to Mr. Hanlon quickly, unable to keep the excitement out of his voice even though a savage part of him has woken up and is whispering furtive and needling things like _quiet_ and _rude_ and _don’t bother Mike’s father like that._

“Oh it’s just a small hive off the back of the tractor shed, I don’t sell em. I only take enough for a couple generous jars every year,

“Generous indeed, and here’s me returning the favor,”

Mr. Uris unravels a large rectangle of blue handkerchief to reveal what looks like it could be a slab of maple fudge. He shows it to Bill.

“Halva, it’s made from tahini and honey, our recipe is simple but you can put anything you like in it, chocolate, pistachios. If you want to get fancy you can add cooking resins to make it different colors,”

Mr. Uris then hands the wrapped Halva to Mike’s father, who holds it to his chest and closes his eyes for a moment as if in silent prayer, like he’s been bestowed a great treasure.

“Would you like to try some Bill?” Mr. Hanlon asks after a moment, opening one eye at Bill.

“No th-that’s okay, it’s yuh-yours,”

“Nonsense, I’ll cut you a corner, I can’t possibly eat it all,”

“Who says you’ll be the one eating it?” Jesse calls from the kitchen.

“R-really it’s fine! It was made for you,” Bill feels a tight clenching thing in his chest at being put on the spot. That savage voice resurfaces. _Shouldn’t have asked questions, now they think you want something from them._

Mrs. Hanlon comes back with two mugs of coffee, one for Stan’s father, one for herself. Mike’s father declines, it’s not good for his stomach. Rabbi Uris sees Bill glance at his mug and offers him his cup. Again that stitch of tightness. _Annoying boy._ He’s not doing a well enough job hiding his desires. _Needy, selfish boy._ His posture and glances must be begging for attention. _Stupid, thoughtless, rude-_

“You don’t think maybe Bill would like some of his own coffee, Donnie?” Will Hanlon asks.

Donnie takes a sidelong look at Bill and he so resembles Stan in that moment, with amber eyes and a sharp, nicely proportioned, slightly downturned nose.

“Are you sure that’s a good idea?”

Mr. Hanlon laughs a deep rich sound, his cheeks dimple much the same as his son’s and his voice is really just a pitch or so different than Mike’s.

Bill quickly examines the idea that children are tiny remixes of their parents, like a mini vynl of your two favorite albums mashed together at random. Then he stops because he doesn’t want to think what kind of song that makes him.

“Bill’s not a baby, he’s seventeen I’m sure he’s had coffee before,”

Bill hasn’t in fact had coffee. When he quietly says as much the three adults look at him with some disbelief before a sort of giddy excitement stirs the air around the three of them. Mrs. Hanlon actually giggles. Bill’s heart does something like a wobble at the light youthful sound.

“Oh my Bill, dear heart. Please let me be the one to make you your first cup of coffee,”

_My Bill. Dear heart._

Bill’s face flushes with intense heat and he ducks his head to examine the rug beneath his feet, which has suddenly become so incredibly interesting. He’s drifting in the shock of the endearment and his internal chastisement has gone mute. He finds himself agreeing to Mrs. Hanlon’s request.

“I’d l-l-love some puh-please,”

She makes him a ‘cappuccino’ with lots of honey and cream and Bill is entirely flabbergasted, but happily drinks it down. _God_ it is delicious! If not one of the stronger flavors Bill has ever experienced. It is warm and sweetly creamy, it tastes faintly of wildflowers from the honey.

When he glances up over the rim of his cup Bill finds that they are all watching him intently. There is room for but one sharp sliver of anxiety before Bill sees in their eyes that they are not irritated with him but fond and excited, anticipatory. Immediately he’s flooded with relief and also a little guilt. Their hospitality is genuine, of course it is. The other shoe is never going to drop. This is Mike’s mom and dad, this is Stan’s dad. Bill must be paranoid, crazy, to fear he could outstay his welcome here.

It’s a surreal experience to have these grown ups fawning over him, pushing a generous plateful of pie into his lap after the proffered coffee. Sliding him a corner of Halva despite his previous declination. Looking at him with curious intent to see his reaction to each new thing. Bill came to the Hanlon’s carrying dread, now he finds himself warm and fed and...happy.

Bill thinks he might be a fool but being in the rustic beauty of the Hanlon sitting room makes him feel strangely young again, weightless in his bones like he hasn’t felt in a long time, as if seventeen was old by any stretch. It’s an odd freeing feeling, a little the same as when Bill rides Silver like a streak of lightning down the hill. It is wind lifting the fabric of his shirt under his arms and the firing of the playing cards against the spokes, and if Bill closes his eyes there’s the vertigo of uncertainty but also the sensation of flying and being alive. It is both a good and frightening feeling, happy and bittersweet but in the loveliest way. It is carefree.

Frankly it’s also overwhelming. It hits Bill all too quickly, that this is what Normal is supposed to be.

Bill feels his eyes start to itch and he has to excuse himself to the bathroom where he splashes his face with cold water and smooths his bangs away from his forehead. He’s hit with the stupidest urge to cry, over pie and coffee. He scoffs and has to swallow it so it doesn’t turn into something more like a sob. Real chuckalicious, Richie would say.

The Hanlons offer for Bill to stay for dinner, they tell him Mike should be home within the hour but Mr. Uris laughs and places a warm fatherly hand on Bills sharp shoulder. Bill tries very hard not to lean into it. _Needy boy._

“I saw him first, next time he’s wandering the trainyard alone you can have dibs,”

Bill frowns, he wishes Stan’s father wouldn’t mention that. He knows Mike and his father talk a lot, closely about all kinds of things, and Bill really doesn’t want the others to realize that he visited the Neibolt house. They're preoccupied with him enough as it is lately.

Back at the Uris home, primed with more food and company, Bill feels incredible. He’s hyped up on coffee and Stan’s parents are laughing into their wine, giving him fond and indulgent glances. Stan is looking at Bill with his eyes crinkled in that cheeky knowing way he does, thin mouth crooked in a half grin, holding back some zinger too sharp for parental company.

“Bill you sound like Eddie, talking a mile a minute. You’ve seriously never had coffee before?”

“Good Stan, I’d be luh-lucky to s-s-sound like Eddie because Eh-Eds is CUTE,” Bill practically yells it. His heart is beating so fast he’s worried his body won’t contain it, and the top of his head feels like it might be vibrating outwards through the tips of his hair.

“Dammit Bill now you sound like Richie and I’m going to have to ask you to leave-you’ve seriously never had coffee before?” Stan interrupts himself, incredulous at the thought,  “God, you maniac. You went and drank a whole cappuccino at what, 5pm?”

“I heard it was buh-bitter so I never wanted to try, I like sweets Stan. But the way Mikey’s muh-mom makes it isn’t buh-bitter at all. They p-p-p-pu-p-! They add loads of cream and honey in it, and fr-froth it all up!”

The two of them yammer back and forth about the merits of various caffeinated beverages. Stan, of course, is more of a tea person but when he does drink coffee he likes it straight black. Bill makes fun of Stan because of course his pretentious ass drinks black artisanal french press.

“We do have an espresso machine, he does use it,” Andrea Uris admits and Bill lets out a loud shout of triumph that has Stan smacking him to shush him up.

After dinner Stan and Bill go upstairs and work on some Trigonometry homework. Bill’s laser focus begins to fade around 9pm and he experiences what Stan refers to as ‘The Crash’. Suddenly Bill’s bone deep exhaustion unfurls once more, like great wings, heavy and dead set on pressing him down into sleep.

“Hey, Bill come on. We have a test next week,”

“Don’t wanna, tru-trig is boring, I don’t get nuh-numbers it’s a-a-all jumbles and bull,”

“Repeating senior year alone is boring too,”

“I’m not alone, I huh-have you, dr-drag you down with me, I will,”

Stan peers down at him with narrowed eyes but there’s a fondness in the quirk of his thin lips. Stan sets the textbook aside and slots himself next to Bill’s curled body, he covers Bill with one leg and a ropey arm and pushes his face into the back of Bill’s neck.

“Drag me where? I’ll pull you up with me you idiot,”

Bill hums a contented sound deep in his chest and settles back against Stan, his warmth a welcome thing. Bill has been cold lately.

They doze in and out of consciousness until nearly eleven thirty, which is when Bill remembers his appointment with Richie. He jolts out of Stan’s arms, stuttering apologies and clambers out of his window even as Stan shouts exasperatedly for him to _use the fucking door Bill, you’re going to snap your damn neck!_

“Sorry Stan! I pu-promised, sh-shit! I already missed the program!”

Bill hops on Silver and pedals like the wind all the way to his house. On impulse he skirts around the side under his window where he sees Richie waiting with crossed arms and a deep frown on his face. He’s not looking at anything in particular, fidgeting and kicking the dirt under his feet.

“Ru-Richie! S-s-sorry!”

Richie looks up, moonlight catching white on the panes of his glasses.

“Take it you didn’t tune in then,” Bill hears the disappointment in his voice and his stomach sinks. He stops just short of touching the other boy, he feels awkward and awful. Like the worst best friend in history.

Bill can tell Richie’s actually upset and Bill doesn’t blame him. Bill feels off-kilter and ashamed. He can’t be doing this, whatever’s going on he can’t let it affect the ways in which he’s supposed to be there for his friends. He got so wrapped up in feeling good he broke a promise.

“S-s-s-sorry,”

Richie winces, as if hearing Bill apologize is a particularly unpleasant experience.

“S'all right,” Richie pushes his glasses up on the bridge of his nose and pinches his fingers tight there for a moment. When he takes them away Richie’s wearing his normal expression and it twists sharply in Bill’s chest that he did that. He made Richie sad, and then couldn’t even apologize properly enough for Richie to open up about it.

Bil should press the issue, should make Richie be still, should take responsibility for his forgetfulness. Weakness at letting himself fall asleep, so comforted by Stan after being so spoiled by the Hanlons. But Richie’s swagger is already back, that off-kilter scarecrow sway, the look on his face that tells of jokes forming and thoughts flitting from witty remark to snappy comeback.

“Shame though. You missed all the chuckalicious jokes I made about Eddie’s mom,”

“I’m sh-sure he loved them,” Bill gives up, Richie will only feel uncomfortable if Bill brings it up again now that Richie has decided they’re back to normal.

Richie bows low “Of course he did, he’s our Spagh’Eddie Man,”

Then he turns about face, bowing again for Bill to lead the way, like a sentinel ready and waiting for his king.

Bill lets them into the house. He’s quiet out of habit, not necessity. They pick their way up the stairs to Bill’s room and Bill might feel the thrill of defiance if his parents were the type to care about him sneaking friends in after dark.

The stairway banister is covered in a light film of dust and several picture frames are crooked, Bill makes a mental note to clean at some point even though he knows he’ll never do it, and pointedly redirects his mind from the fact that most crooked pictures feature him.

Richie is pressing into Bill’s side as soon as the door shuts behind them and Bill slings an arm around Richie like it’s instinct.

“I can’t believe you missed my first show, you’re a real asshole you know that?”

“I know,” Bill says glumly. Still at a loss for words, still struggling to make up. He has an opening now if he can just-

“Hey, hey! None of that, not while I’m here. It’s a crazy time of year, I get it. Where were you though? Biking around alone at night? I thought you had writing to do?” Richie always lets Bill off so easy.

“Nuh-no I came from Stan’s I stay-”

“Bill! Why didn’t you say so? All is forgiven L-O-V-E-R boy!”

“Sh-shut up, I was studying for Trig,”

“Studying some angles I’m sure,” Richie cants his hips suggestively and Bill smacks him in the stomach. Richie makes a high ugly dying sound and goes slack against Bill before collapsing, effectively pulling him down to the floor on top of Richie.

“Oof! R-Richie!”

“Ooooh! Ooooh I’ve been hit! I’ve been shot! I’ve been gutted ah say! Gutted!”

“Richie,” Bill says, muffled into the fabric of his friend’s sweatshirt. Richie has snaked his arms and legs around Bill like a boa constrictor, effectively trapping Bill on top of him.

“The trenches! They’re comin don awn top of me! Save yahselves lads save yahselves! Kiss a pretty girl for me once yah feet land homebound, kiss a prettier boy!”

Bill chuckles dryly into Richie’s shoulder. The other boy is hot to the touch and Bill stays still to feel the soothing warmth, the life and energy of his friend, like a bright furnace. After a moment Richie drops his act and his arms relax their hold on Bill. Richie’s too good to him, Bill thinks again. Forgives him any trespass, indulges his selfish silence.

“Hey Bill,”

“Hmm?”

“Eds is like, super worried about you,”

“R-really?”

“Yeah it’s all he talks about lately,”

“Aw shit,”

Bill huffs a breath into Richie’s sweater, it’s soft as down from use and washing.

“You _are_ eating right? I don’t have to be worried too?”

“Wh-wat? Come on that’s mighty r-r-rich coming fr-from you. Did yuh-you not eat chips f-f-for dinner tonight?”

Richie presses his lips together into a line and pretends to be thinking really hard.

“Maybeee,”

“Right, I’ll have you k-k-know I nuh-not only got f-f-fed pie at Mikey’s but had a wh-whole Jewish feast at Stan’s for duh-dinner tonight so I don’t w-wuh-want to hear-”

Bill is rudely interrupted by a loud honk of laughter from Richie which quickly dissolves into fitful giggles.

“What?” He asks somewhat indignantly.

“J-jewish feast? Oh God Bill, I’ll fucking bet! How is that kosher sausage Bill? How is-Ow!”

“You’re suh-so nasty s-s-sometimes! No wonder Eh-Eddie can’t go a minute wuh-without ssslapping you,”

“Those are love taps,”

“Pr-pretty hard love taps from wh-where I’m standing,”

Richie is still laughing between his words so Bill rolls his eyes and gives him another none-too gentle ‘love tap’ before extracting himself from Richie’s hold and getting up off the floor.

He kicks off his pants and trades his baseball tee for his pajamas before flopping limply on his bed. It’s almost midnight and Bill is goddamn exhausted. Richie’s giggles trail off before going silent, he rubs at his shoulder where Bill hit him, gets off the floor and comes to sit next to Bill on the bed. His leg jiggles with restless energy, Bill knows what’s coming.

“Just don’t... shut me out Bill, you always told me the big stuff, you know like with...the picture and the blood,”

“There is no b-b-big stuff I’m just having s-some trouble sl-sleeping, that’s not rare for any of us,”

Richie makes a noise of acknowledgement in the back of his throat and scoots a little closer next to Bill so that their sides and legs touch. Bill knows he doesn’t sleep well, the veins under Richie’s eyes show through his wax paper pallor no matter how wide he pulls his grin. There are yellow nicotine stains on his nails and pale fingers from too many late night smoke sessions. The smell of cigarette is a bit of a perpetual cloud in Richie’s hair. Eddie hates it, but he understands.

BIll wonders how aware each of the others are. If like him they were spared all but the vaguest periodic, survival-driven remembrance, if like Bill their brains or some higher power caused a cyclical adolescent grace period, a resetting, a Forgetting.

“What ab-about you? That stunt you pulled last wuh-week was w-w-wild Richie, banned from the AV club? Y-yuh-you sure your’e o-okay with that?”

“Mm yeah well, I figure if they’re gonna target Eds might as well get in on the action, you know I’m a slut for negative attention. S’ides it’s true. Big ol Gaylord Tozier, at your service,”

Bill laughs outright at that and it’s gratifying to see a grin stretch over Richie’s face, the most natural of the evening.

“There it is! That Denbrough laugh, Bill, light of my life! What so all I gotta do is homo it up to keep you smiling? Too easy baby,”

Richie reaches across Bill’s lap and cups his face with a large pale hand. Bill grins into it feeling pleasant easy warmth in his heart. Richie is so tactile, some might say overly so but to Bill it is perfect. Richie can give as much as, more than, Bill needs.

“Billiam, really though nothings up?”

“Ruh-really really,”

Richie squints at him from behind the thick black frames, it’s a stupid expression and he pokes his tongue out as if he’s concentrating really hard. Still there is a moment of worry where Bill thinks Richie might not believe him, might push in that all too effective way Richie does.

But the moment passes and Richie’s smile lights up easy on his handsome face.

“Okay! Better than okay, that’s great then!”

Richie delights at the ease of the thing, it’s nice when its like this between them. Bill loves how Richie goes with the flow, how he trusts Bill to know his limits. Mostly if Bill says it’s okay Richie lets it lie, he changes the subject, cracks a joke, shifts the talk to pleasant things. Tonight he plants a big sloppy kiss on Bills forehead before he lunges for his bag, then heads towards the perpetually unlatched window.

“I gotta go now, Eds is expecting his Casanova but here’s for you, since you missed it,”

Richie tosses Bill a cassette mixtape.

“It’s the set from tonight,”

Then Richie clambors out the window and into the dark.

Bill looks down at the cassette and reads the label emblazoned with Richie’s thin all caps scrawl.

_‘SUMMER OF 89_

_1.STAN THE MAN_

_2.EDS_

_3.MIKEY_

_4.TRASHMOUTH_

_5.HAYSTACK_

_6.BEV_

_7.BIG BILL_

_& SIX OTHER RAD TUNES, YOU KNOW THE ONES. - R.T.’ _

Bill is still a moment. He looks up out the window and imagines he can see the outline of Richie standing out from the dark, like a warm flickering star, like a wish, streaking untouchable through the backroads of their evil dangerous town. Bill goes to sleep with his hand clutching the mixtape and his heart full.

Maybe he wants to know what kind of song he is after all.


	4. Bill Denbrough, Same Under the Sycamore

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "As he breathes in the fresh detergent and slightly camphor smell of Eddie in his arms Bill wonders when he got so out of practice at being a good leader, when was it over the course of the past three years that he stopped reaching out, that it became difficult for him to expect his demands would be met or his desires reciprocated."
> 
> \---
> 
> This chapter establishes many things regarding Bill's mental state and his relationship to his friends. It's not an action packed chapter but it's important in beginning to unpack the core of Bill's motivation in this story. If you're still following this fic I would adore your feedback. Thanks for sticking with me, I hope to have chapter five up much sooner.

 

 

_Where do the wild ones go, when they are tame? When they are through? Live in the Ether of blue, tell the truth, and never do damage to you._

_\---_

Bill wakes with his mouth full of blood.

It is thick smothering copper, pushing heavy against his lower lip where it threatens to dribble out and backwards down the sides of his mouth like lines of smooth red paint. Or, Bill might inhale it back into his throat to choke where he lays in the restless sleep-twisted sheets of his bed.

He sprints to the bathroom, both hands cupped tightly over the bottom half of his face. He spits and wretches into the sink because it tastes like a memory so foul Bill has no choice but to be sick.

_Oh God. Oh God his tongue! His tongue his-_

Only, when Bill looks down, there is nothing at all to find. His hands are dry and clean though they rattle with tremors, and when he examines the inside of his mouth in the mirror, all he sees is a whole, healthy, pink tongue nestled in a skull full of white adult teeth.

He slips on the faucet knob with his shaking hands twice before he manages to turn it and cup the first of many mouthfuls of ice cold water to his lips. Bill avoids looking at himself again, he does not want to see the wreck that is his face if he can help it. His eyes are wet and hot so he splashes them free of tears, and tries to blindly salvage the way the dried salt of night sweat has parted and set his hair askew all over his forehead.

Next he reaches for the toothbrush and toothpaste, he bites the brush more than once out of some animal anxiety but also because his hands aren't steady enough to properly keep it in his mouth. He curses himself out for not stocking any mouthwash.

It's not enough, it still-he still-the blood-he can still taste it.

Bill needs something strong, god dammit something-

He spits, then spits again.

Coffee. His parents still stock coffee.

Bill dresses hastily and takes the stairs too quickly. His socks slip after rounding the bend in the stairs on the third step from the bottom, and he has to brace himself hard on the wall in a way that makes his right wrist twinge. Backpack dangling open and in tow, Bill passes by the parlor and the abandoned piano into the kitchen, searching for signs of life that are unsurprisingly absent.

He stands in front of the previously ignored coffee machine and opens the lid of a round copper tin that holds about three inches of dark grounds. Here Bill falters, he has no idea how to actually make a pot. Groaning, Bill grabs the tin between both hands and bows his head down towards it in frustration, as if it will take pity on him and provide instructions.

He scours his memory, he’s surely watched his mother and father execute their morning routine, surely he’s seen them make coffee.

 _Not lately._ A nasty little voice pipes up. _Not in three or four years. You've never seen them do it, you won't be able to make it._

No. He can do it. He has to do it.

Bill needs to figure it out, it’s suddenly irrationally vital that he perform this task.

To try and recapture the feeling of contentment from yesterday, to try and wipe the iron taste from between his gums, to replicate a remembered normalcy and balance, to...not be so fucking affected by a dream he can’t remember anything but the taste of!

It's probably like tea, like hot chocolate.

Bill looks at the machine a little hopelessly. At least it's not a complicated contraption like Stan’s French Press. Just an unassuming black plastic arrangement and the glass pot resting on the warming pad beneath. There is a clear window along the body and when Bill lifts the top to find a place that looks like it holds and measures water, he relaxes a little. The filters have the same shape as the empty ridged basin so Bill fits one in and then adds...One, two, tablespoons of the grounds. It’s double the amount of water to Coffee, he thinks. No, four tablespoons of water? Idiot. That's barely a mouthful.

Bill adds a cup. Two cups just to be safe.

Unlike the Hanlon farm, Bill’s house is empty and no one is looking for his reaction. The coffee manages to be watery and bitter all at once, there’s no honey in the pantry either, so Bill heaps sugar into the mug and fills it to the top with milk to make it palatable.

He resolves to buy honey and cream the next time he stops in at Center Street Drug.

Bill’s appetite is shot but he reasons that the sugar and milk count for something so today he doesn’t push himself to eat more. He tells himself that he’s fine, that it’s all just fine. He’ll ask Stan how to brew a proper cup of joe today at school.

He’s halfway out the front door by the time Bill remembers he forgot his school bag on the floor next to the kitchen table. Fuck. His homework and the mixtape too! Bill left them upstairs on the desk!

He leaves the door open and runs up the stairs without unlacing his red converse. By the time he actually gets out of the house with the cassette player and headphones in hand, and all his homework stuffed like so much garbage into his black backpack, Bill is sweating again and feeling rattled.

Bill fumbles the headphones and the chord comes out of the player, almost jerking it out of his hands and onto the pavement.  

“Fuck! Shit! Goddamn!”

He clutches the tape player in one hand and the tangle of wire and obnoxious bulk of the padded earpieces in the other, pressing them both painfully tight into his chest. That icy wave of almost losing something precious floods him before coming to heel down within his lower stomach. Bill breathes, exposed out on the sidewalk but feeling more centered than when he was inside, and untangles the headphones in a deliberate, careful way. His hold on the cassette player is vice-like and quickly becoming as sweaty as the rest of him.

Calm down, calm down. Just a bad dream. It was just...the echo of a bad dream. Sure! Just a-just a fucking, waking, blood-filled-mouth dream. Illusion blood, fake blood that tasted so much like- _real blood the same as the blood from Beverly’s_ -No. It’s fine. Fine. You’re okay, you’re fine, you’re okay, you’re fine.

Fine.

Finally Bill yanks the cables free, he slides the headband like piece over his head and adjust the cheap foam against his ears. He plugs in the aux, loads Richie’s mixtape, and clicks play on side A.

_This next half hour is a ra-ra-radical lineup of tunes to bring you back to simpler times, pure and free danger times! The summer of 1989 folks, it was a wild year, never a mild year! Kick back for this throwback of très anõs top of the chart tunes seniõrs and senõritas! Love, betrayal, the trials and tribulations of youth, friendship never dies when you’re jammin to these electric beats. Listen and reminisce, maybe they were the worst years of your life, maybe they were the best years! You were a loser, a deadbeat, a trashmouth. A lover, a fighter, a wrong side-o-the-tracks outsider, but hey so was I, and it’s all gonna be alright tonight!_

Richie’s voice, his Voice. Announcer like and smoothed of all but a pinch of that adolescent awkwardness comes through the headset, good and so familiar. Richie pitches it deeper on the show than he does in the day, matches it with the cover of dark skies in that special twinkling cricket racket between 10pm and midnight.

Bill sighs deeply. He closes his eyes and leans his weight against Silver for a moment, breathing the morning air, feeling the rustle of leaves in the trees. He feels present in his body for once, not distracted, not distraught or restless. He snaps the tape player to the waistband of his jeans, mounts Silver and heads to pick up Eddie on the way to school. He lets Richie’s voice and the music Bill knows was chosen for him, for all seven of them, guide him to calm and good and bittersweet nostalgic places.

Places of the moments in the summer of 1989 before they went down the well. When they were all together, all happy and whole, and the shimmering bond between the seven made them so different and special from the whole entire world in a way as yet untempered by darkness.

They had the magic of the stars between them on those dusty July days when they crowded into the clubhouse for shade, those heavy summer nights. They possessed the electric life of fireflies, the beat between a bluebird’s wing. Youth and love and friendship eternal for those sparse few weeks of summer.

The music fades in and out with a few witty comments like _This one’s a Haystack special_! for Stevie Nicks’ ‘Rooms on Fire’ and while Bill listens, Richie’s Voice mixes with the caffeine and makes him feel miles better than this morning. He remembers thinking yesterday that Richie is like a shooting star, a wishing star, and Bill feels miles better than he has in weeks.

It’s easy to push the taste of blood away when he greets Eddie outside the porch of ‘Casa Kaspbrak’, as Richie calls it, and rides him double to school. Easier still to bury the memory of  just how badly his hands shook when, despite the twinge of Bill’s wrist, they nail an extended badminton volley that has the whole rest of the class gathering around them in excited appreciation. So very easy to dismiss it all to nothing when Bill can instead focus on Eddie flushing with the pride of getting positive attention for being good at sports.

Eddie’s chattering excitedly by the time they hit the showers and he doesn’t cast Bill a single glance of worry. It feels so good in contrast, watching Eddie’s hands talk, gesture, fly about his face with each word. His brow is smooth-no worry lines, he's smiling easy, his eyes are wide and lively. It makes Bill want to lift him off his feet and embrace him tightly, fiercely, but of course here in the boys locker room, Bill holds back. Instead Bill asks,

“Hey Eh-Eds do you w-want to take lunch off school grounds today?”

“You mean go some place?”

“Uh huh, my treat. Yuh-your m-mom signed the p-p-p-p-per-p! The release form this year right?”

“Yeah first time she ever did, it's a damn miracle I convinced her. Ridiculous you know? Could you imagine? Have you ever heard of a senior who doesn't have permission to leave for lunch?”

“Ruh-ridiculous,” Bill shakes his head in agreement.

“Where to? Should we wait for the guys or meet them there?”

“Well,” and here Bill presses his side to the lockers, angling so his back is to the rest of their gym class, shielding them a little, and lowers his voice as he looks through his fringe at Eddie.

“I w-was thinking it could be just us t-two,”

Eddie snaps his mouth shut. His brown eyes go huge. Bill’s stomach takes a dive. Immediately that needling voice comes alive. _Stupid boy. Needy boy._

Bill tries to backtrack quickly. _Who would want to spend time with you._

“I-if you d-don't wuh-wanna th-th-tha-” Bill’s stutter betrays his nerves. Eddie picks up on it and his expression softens, something sad striked across it even if his cheeks carry a lovely flush.

“God Bill, of course I want to! I was wondering if you were _ever_ gonna ask me out again. Let’s damn well go then!”

Eddie grabs Bills wrist and nearly drags him out of the locker room sans left shoe. By the time they finally have all their clothes on right and are standing near the bike rack out back the school, Bill is in stitches and Eddie’s face is tomato red.

“Not a word of this Bill. Not a word,”

Still chuckling, Bill makes a zipping motion across his mouth. He gets on Silver and Eddie finds his place behind him. He wraps his arms around his middle and Bill shuts up the part of him that warns _he's counting your ribs, he can feel your spine._

Bill rides Eddie double around the corner of the building and across the front yard of the school. Richie sees them through the open window of his soon-to-end second period class and shouts something about kidnapping obnoxiously loudly after them. They hear Mrs. Abbot scold him harshly and Eddie sniggers out ‘idiot’ under his breath.

“Hi ho Silver! Awayyy!” Bill bellows, and Eddie mimics it against his back.

They ride leisurely from the school past the library, to the center of town. They take a right swoop down Main Street, meandering and swerving too and fro to dodge big cracks or potholes scattered like cement graves across the street. It is  quiet at this time of day, without many cars to contend with. Irregularities in the asphalt pass them by, summoned by the change of seasons, the freezing and thawing of water in the ground. Silver moves like a car, almost as fast and much more smooth, so they soon arrive and park the old girl on the pavement outside the department store. A small food court inside serves cheap deli sandwiches, sodas for kids and beer for the grown ups.

Bill orders and pays. Then they tote their wax paper wrapped sandwiches and glass bottles of soda, which Eddie balances in his arms while Bill drives, until they get to their predetermined rest stop at McCarren park.

They take up residence under a sycamore tree still mostly full of green leaves and dig into their lunch. Bill holds out his hand for Eddie’s soda and uses the protection of his baseball shirt to crack off the cap. If he grips it tight enough and with ample fabric he can manage a task otherwise reserved for a bottle opener.

Eddie chews, leans against the tree, and lets his ankle rest against the side of Bill’s leg. Bill breathes deeply after a sip of soda and closes his eyes, he enjoys the feel of the wind of September’s end rustle his hair.

One month into the school year and already everything about it feels so settled. September will pass to October, will call in the winter and then after what always seems too long and dreary a time, Spring will rise from cold slumber. Summer will chase the heels of the two previous seasons like a sprinter, as if to apologize and make up for all the cold, and then the Losers, Bill included, will be off to College and beyond.

What a wild thought. Spending the afternoon with Eddie like this makes the inevitable passage of time seem fake, but Bill knows soon he’ll be riding Silver through March muck mud and then heat will rain down with the green sway of leaves just like those above him and Eddie on this afternoon. They’ll all turn eighteen, one after the other, like birds taking off from a wire, out of this town and out of childhood forever.

“I heard you missed Richie’s radio show,”

“Yeah,” Bill cracks an eye and sighs. “I'm the wo-worst,”

Eddie looks thoughtful, wise, as if he’s on the cusp of something insightful.

“Heard you ditched him to cheat on me with Stan,”

Bill tries hard not to aspirate a mouthful of sandwich but it’s rather useless and he coughs hard for the next minute. Eddie laughs at him outright, and turning, smiling, opening up his face towards Bill to revel in his mishap without reservation, claps him on the back hard. “That's what you get! That's what you get for laughing at me earlier!”

“I duh-didn't la-laugh, I was j-just concerned for your wuh-wellbeing, run any faster and you’d ha-have an asthma a-attack,” Bill chokes out. He wipes at his mouth to free it of crumbs.

“Hush you, we all know those are psychosomatic,” Eddie says it lazy and dismissive, Bill feels a thread of pride ring tight in his chest.

“I'm glad you remember that, Eddie,”

Bill doesn't mean for it to come out so heavily laddled with relief. Eddie stops mid motion, for just a second before he recovers, like a record skipping. Ah shit. Bill has given Eddie the opening he was looking for.

“Richie said you were remembering more, that's why you've been acting off,”

Bill pauses then rubs a hand over his face. Stan, then Richie, now Eds. Why can’t they leave him be? Rather, it’s not their fault but his. Why can't Bill stop being so weird.

“Don’t wuh-worry about me Eh-Eddie,”

Eddie snorts in reply. “That's like telling me to stop breathing, or to not wash my hands, or to quit stocking aspirin. If I didn't worry about you you'd be dead from some reckless stunt already. You and Richie are the worst, talking about stuff without me, leaving me out,”

“Did you like your song?” Bill changes the subject.

“Show Don’t Tell. Mhm. Bill, you’ve shown me. So tell me,” Edde cuts through the diversion with little patience, like swiping away a gnat. Eddie’s ruthless like that sometimes. Has to be, with his mother the way she is.

Bill’s hands tighten over his biceps where he has crossed his arms over his chest. He takes a breath and holds it. He tightens his grip harder, painfully, and doesn’t look at Eddie when he speaks. How to navigate this, Eddie is harder than Richie. He thrives inside the act of scrutiny, hungers for the truth, and is much less forgiving when he finds it.

“That s-s-summer...comes and guh-goes. If I remember a lot all of a s-sudden, the spe-s-specifics you know, that's u-usually when I have a bad day,”

It’s an answer. Sure, an answer.

“On days like that it’s hard to eat?” Eddie tries, brazen, tactless, Bill thinks. God, Eddie really tries.

 _Please shut up._ Bill thinks more desperately. There's a part of him that's angry Eddie won't let him be. Why can't he trust him anymore, leave Bill to his own devices like they were kids. Bill is fine. Mostly.

Bill makes a muffled noise, it sounds wounded from where he hears it reverberating in the between space of his skull. He can’t look up at Eddie, he can’t continue this thread of conversation. Eddie let it alone why won’t you. The scrutiny hurts, Bill’s unused to it and it feels raw passed over the skin of neglected years.

“Yeah, sure,” He croaks out. Bill doesn’t offer further explanation even though he can feel Eddie’s hovering anxiety pawing at him, just begging for him to elaborate.

Instead Bill tells a truth not his own to avoid having to think about himself at all. It’s Richie’s truth, Ben’s, Mikey’s too maybe. It’s a universal thing between the seven of them, the getting worse with remembering. Memories crashing upon the shore of the mind and turning security to sand. It’s a blanket answer that works even if it’s a rather big lie, and how fitting that Bill is relying on tactics of dishonestly, covering, burying, refusing to acknowledge.

This town, _God._ This town.

Bill’s recollection of that summer isn’t the problem here.

“I’ve forgotten almost everything,” Eddie admits. He bites at his lip.

“All I know is that Ma’s a...a liar, and that the things she tells me about myself aren’t true. That’s the only bit I’ve managed to keep, the only thing I’m really sure of and still it only helps so much,”

Bill finally meets Eddie’s eyes, he sees shame in them, guilt for not sharing as much of the burden of remembering, for still carrying his inhaler and more or less letting his mother coo, smother, and drag him to the clinic at the slightest onset of a cold. For not being more vocal in his fight to win independence and instead snatching his freedom and wildness in defiant bursts when she isn’t looking.

Suddenly Bill is madly glad, glad that Eddie is spared the memories. Bill has such easy access to them since running up against the border of the Neibolt house and while they do not cripple him, they certainly aren’t nice. That summer wasn’t, in retrospect and despite the magic between them, a nice summer at all.

Bill can remember it clearly now. The storm, the flood. Rain, so much rain, and the burning gurgle of the endless cough trapped in his chest.

October 9th.

_Don’t be a wuss._

_You want her to float, don’t you?_

_We call boats she._

_I love you Billy._

_Be c-careful._

October 10th, 11th, 12th.

The rain, the rain, the dreadful rain.

How Bill’s persistence in the subsequent weeks turned months was greeted with mutual hope, watery indulgence, then tears, exasperation, anger, and finally a long and gradually deepening silence. One that has not since ended.

No, Bill decides. Eddie doesn’t need all that terror and violence bogging him down, memories of the Leper least of all. It settles a little bit of Bill’s worry about himself, the fact that he can still do something useful for Eddie, that he can take on the strain, remember enough for the both of them.

“That’s the important stuff,” Bill assures him.

“Bill I…” Eddie starts, he purses his lips and his eyebrows draw down. He wears that grown up, worn out look again. There’s irritation as well.

“You don’t always have to be protecting me, I can handle myself. Unload some stuff on me every once in a while, Bill,”

“Th-there’s nothing to unload, Eddie. I s-s-swear. Just, you know, some bad dr-dreams, bad memories, not even a-all the time. The same as the rest of you,”

Eddie still wears the unhappy expression and Bill is at a loss. All he wants is for Eddie to look up at him like he did that summer, convinced Bill was infallible.

“Bill please, I know I nag, it's only because I lo…” Eddie stops. He tastes the familiar words of his mother on his tongue like bitter vinegar, and doesn’t finish the sentence.

_It’s only because I love you, because I care._

“Bill, you scare me sometimes. Or, not _you!_ I could never be scared _of you,”_

Eddie pauses, he wears an expression of intense concentration, like he's got something at the tip of his tongue. Only he can't roll it into words.

Finally he looks at Bill with his big dark eyes and the expression of fear and bewilderment there makes Bill want to cover his face and cry out.

“There’s something going on isn’t there?”

Instead Bill steadies his voice, looks right at Eddie and reassures him.

“No,” He says softly.

“No, Eddie please. You go-gotta trust me when I tell you there’s really nothing,”

Bill says it earnestly and in part it is the truth, because if Bill is being honest he can’t rightly pinpoint one specific thing he deems worthy enough of Eddie’s distress to bring forward.

Bill doesn’t himself know what his problem is, it is vague and fluctuating, blurry and startlingly sharp in turn. He just can’t bring himself to make a fuss, to drag everyone into his drama _again_ unless it’s real, tangible, unavoidable like it had been that Summer.

Eddie scrutinizes him, he looks no less unhappy.

“I trust you Bill, you know I do. I’d follow you anywhere,”

“I’d go back… there,” Eddie makes a vague swipe with his hand, eyes squinted trying to remember exactly where he’s saying he’ll go. No matter, if Bill needs it Eddie _will_ go.

“Y-yeah I know,”  

“I want to protect you,”

Bill finds his eyes going wide, purely startled by the earnest admission. Eddie looks at him and his stupidly wide eyes, then he smacks him on the shoulder.

“Don’t make fun. I’m serious you dummy,”

At that the mood rapidly shifts. Bill smiles, and Eddie weakens under the power of it. They fall to a silence that is not exactly peaceful, but Eddie has stopped looking at Bill with concern just short of tears.

They finish eating their sandwiches and gradually, as the minutes pass, Bill is able to forcibly ignore the idea that Eddie might think him fragile. He is easily caught up by the breath of the park, the texture of grass, slightly damp under the seat of his pants, and the roughness of tree bark against his back, close to bone. Texture and sensation, the essence of things, has always been the realest element to Bill, stuff he takes into himself and files away for later, for writing.

Admittedly, Bill is also having trouble ignoring Eddie’s legs. Because despite late September bringing colder days, Eddie’s still wearing those damn short shorts he loves so much. Bill reaches over and pulls on a leg hair. Eddie yelps and again, swats him rather hard.

“Jeeze! Who are you, Richie?”

“M not Richie, you keep br-bruh-binging him up. If you luh-like him so much why don’t you m-marry him,”

“Gross, Bill,”

Bill chuckles lightly before producing his cassette player. It's a kind of peace offering, a return to normal for them. They press up against each other casually, boyishly, so they can share the cheap headpiece to listen to the mixtape in the dappled sunlight under the sycamore.

They are in a section of the park far removed from other people and it affords them some privacy, but not enough to touch freely like Bill wants to. He's tempted to wrap his fingers around the slim slope of Eddie’s ankle, just above his tube socks with the little green stripe, or maybe kiss his cheek, softly and just once, but he doesn't dare. Not in the open.

Eventually the cycle of songs on tape side B comes to an end and the finale of QUEEN’s ‘Who Wants to Live Forever’ has Bill feeling more than a little restless. He badly wants touch now, physical reassurance that all is truly well again between him and Eddie, something accessible to Bill in a way so much easier than words.

Bill stands slowly, Eddie shift and follows, his eyes flick to Silver questioningly until Bill turns and takes hold of a low hanging branch offered by the Sycamore, wedges his foot against a knoll in the bark and hoists himself up

“Bill!” Eddie squeaks with surprise. He looks around as if some adult might come running to scold them. Then he remembers this is Derry and that grown ups who are not his mother rarely care what Eddie does.

“Bill be careful!”

Eddie scolds him for a split second before Bill looks down from the tree and smiles a full, hundred watt Denbrough smile at him. All blue and freckled and white, all charming and honest and vulnerable without meaning to be. Lovely is the word. Lovely. And Eddie is caught in the blue.

Bill beccons down to Eddie, he feels the breeze on his neck and the tickle of his auburn hair pulled into his face by the rush of wind through the branches of the tree above them. He watches the worry dissolve from Eddie’s face to be replaced with something adoring and eager, as Eddie loses himself easily to the wilds of youth. When he reaches the top, Eddie is a little breathless but it's more giddy adrenaline rush than any kind of asthma, psychosomatic or not, and Bill feels validated.

They balance high in the tree, still held together by the hand Bill used to hoist Eddie up with him. Perched in a place such that it keeps them perfectly hidden from the rest of the town, only someone passing directly beneath them and looking up could see the intertwine of their fingers.

Bill has not let go of his urge from earlier in the locker room, if anything his rapidly beating heart wildly encourages it. This time safe from Derry eyes, Bill acts on it. He pulls Eddie towards him, garnering somewhat of a panicked yelp as they are roughly ten feet up, and hugs Eddie tightly against himself the way he's been wanting to for hours.

And oh, it feels like breathing easy again. It feels secure and safe, though Bill is taller and bigger than Eddie. He feels somehow held together in a way he wasn’t before.

Eddie falls into it immediately, and returns the embrace with double the fierceness, so much strength in his little body. Natural is the best way to describe it. Bill knows he needs such things the way a plant desires sunlight, and his his friends can give him this, they give it freely. He only has to allow himself to ask.

Isn't it just so? How light Bill felt just from food in good company at the Hanlons, warmth from being close to Stan, how much better being in Richie’s presence made him and he hadn’t even needed to talk about anything at all.

Allowing this...vulnerability. He was really good at it when they were younger, asking them to help him, expecting everyone to follow his lead without ever doubting for a second that they wouldn’t. Taking up space naturally, delightedly, like it was a right.

As he breathes in the fresh detergent and slightly camphor smell of Eddie in his arms Bill wonders when he got so out of practice at being a good leader, when was it over the course of the past three years that he stopped reaching out, that it became difficult for him to expect his demands would be met or his desires reciprocated.

Bill is struck with a powerful desire to spill his guts, to bare his whole jumble of incoherent anxieties and feelings to Eddie right there in the treetops. Tell him everything even if Bill isn’t so sure what that everything is yet.

There are several somethings Bill could start with.

Bill can tell Eddie about the suspected bad dreams, and maybe that for a while now food cooked at home tastes like either dust or copper. There are more regular things Eddie and the Losers could help him with, banal tasks that Bill need not bare his heart to reveal, how the heater in his room hasn’t been fixed since it broke last November. Eddie and Ben could definitely sort it, with their research and mechanical dexterity, if Bill only asked.

Other things he’d rather not speak of, but that he could bring himself to now, with Eddie close this way.

How his mother will not leave her room, how she cries. God. There should be deep trenches of hollowed flesh along her cheeks, three years deep from the salt of grief still overflowing. How the piano is encased in a film of dust Bill dares not disturb even though he daily longs to play, and how Bill literally can’t remember the last time he and his father exchanged more than a patchy string of words.

Lastly.

About going to Neibolt. The string he suddenly feels, tethering him to it. The return of all of his memories in sharp and biting detail, additional memories of the past three years that Bill is not so sure the others share. Growing pains one might say. How the six of them each faltered, only to come together. Bill’s creeping suspicion that maybe he isn’t immune to It’s darkness anymore, no longer strong like he was when he was thirteen.

Now that Bill thinks of it, he might have a pretty damn good idea of what’s going on. He only needs the other’s insight to make complete sense of it, to suss out what it all means and what to do about it...the same way he did back then. They all had to come together to make sense of it. Bill shouldn’t be keeping any of this to himself.

He’ll tell Eddie, Bill definitely will. When the time is right. When it really gets serious, when he’s sure beyond a shadow of a doubt that he can’t take care of it on his own. Someday soon he’ll ask the others for help like he so earnestly did when they were thirteen, flitting into fourteen.

Someday soon but not right now. For now Bill is in love with his childhood friend, and for now, so easily, he hugs Eddie close and lies by omission.

\---

Richie ambushes Bill by the water fountain between Trig and English, and makes his presence known by snapping the exposed waistband of Bill’s boxers. Bill inelegantly snorts a nostril full of water, much to Richie’s manic delight.

“Trying to steal my man I see,” Richie accuses, grinning.

Bill coughs and tries to swing at Richie while also wiping his face and front free of the spilled water. Richie ducks easily out of his way.

“Can’t steal what’s already mine,”

“Yours? Oh ho! Them’s fighting words Billiam, next you’ll be going for Ben, for Mike! Bev and Stan already hopped that train, is no one safe from your scheming slutty, slutty whiles?”

“You’re next sir _Richard_ ,”

“Well I deah say! You ah the boldest, the most fahwad, man I have evah met! Bill Denbrough! Wait till mah daddy heahs about this,”

Richie fans at himself exaggeratedly and bats his long dark lashes at Bill.

“Wh-who _is_ your daddy, Richie?” Bill asks, leaning forward into his space with a grin.

Richie positively squawks, Bill thinks he might see a blush climbing up his speckled neck.

“I’m mah OWN woman thank ye vuhrey much! No man owns me!” Richie says, Voice filled with faux indignation.

“Haven’t you heard? Everything is mine, and I’m no man. I’m the blue god of this earth,”

Bill and Richie look at each other. There is a beat, then they both erupt into peals of laughter.

Bill feels laughter, real laughter rumble in his chest on the way out and there he is, finally. Fully himself once more.

They hipcheck an shove each other into the lockers, squabbling and laughing as they make their way down the hall to their respective classes.

Bill focuses long enough in Trig that he actually grasps an equation or two, albeit he does double check his answers with Stan, writes up a storm in English, and finds the energy to stick around with the gang after school. The dappled sunlight has turned into heavy clouds fat with rain so today they hit up the arcade. Football practice has been cancelled for danger of lightning strike and Mike and Ben join them. Richie just got paid for the weekly chores and Stan’s got holiday money still saved so it’s the two of them that spring for a round of laser tag.

Eddie is a little maniac and he and Mike are a merciless tag team, Mike literally hoists Eddie onto platforms and holds him up so he can shoot over walls. Stan is a silent sentry, perfectly calculated in his approach and hiding places. Waiting like a cat in long grass for the impatient mice to scurry into his paw. Ben as always, balances Stan’s conservative strategy and patience with his ferocious no-holds barred sprint and charge style.

Bill and Richie, the dream team? Well, ironically they suck.

These days Bill can’t aim for shit. Whether it be because of puberty stretching his limbs, or some other reason, his four out of ten accuracy percentile has been reduced to a one or worse. Richie shoots at everything and everyone indiscriminately, he’s so tall and gawky that he’s useless at hiding, and he can’t fucking see when his glasses get fogged up with sweat and heavy breathing. The two of them always claim Beverly when she’s around, because she’s the real muscle of the group and frankly balances their idiot duo’s piss poor performance.

“God I wish Bev were here, she’s always aces and I’m flying blind,” Richie sighs after his second deactivation in a row. Bill nods as he slumps hidden behind a carpeted outpost with cheap strips of plastic painted red and green neon, gear dark, also deactivated, and listens to Eddie cackle and vault away from them like a little gremlin.

The game is over soon enough though. Richie and Bill suffer the humiliation of loss as expected, badly and with a lot of skulking around together, giving the other four shifty-eyed pouts. Bill doesn’t really mind, it’s just nice to have them all (almost) together like this, carefree and excited. Playing, goofing off. It reminds him that they’re still kids, and that feels good.

It feels more than good when they crowd around him, all clamborning for a view of the screen, and slap down quarters calling dibs on the next round of centipede. It’s perfectly youthful boyish communication, without words, instinct and pack driven. It’s right is what it is, and Bill feels suddenly one hundred and ten percent recalibrated. Secure again in the knowledge that he is unconditionally wanted amidst their little group. He even manages to feel a sort of hopeful determination again. Like he can handle anything in the whole world.

After the relief of that first evening passed into morning, the Hanlon’s, Stan’s, Richie’s mixtape, after time spent with Eddie, and now the rest at the arcade, Bill feels renewed, untouchable. That’s what his friends give him, that’s why even with the passage of time pressing down on his life, Bill gets out of bed every single day. That like always, this new strange low was but a temporary moodiness, just a hiccup.

Bill writes off yesterday’s business with 29 Neibolt House. If he is hearing things, it is because he remembers what they did, and because in Derry, sometimes odd echoes of history are par for the course. It’s certainly nothing to cause a scene over, nothing worth the worry of Bill’s most important people.

It’s over, this mood Bill’s in, whatever it is. It can't survive the power of the love of his friends.

 

\---

 

It is in fact, not over.

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter four, as in its been FOUR HUNDRED years since chapter three. Thank you for your patience. Life, writers block, and many other factors contributed to the delay. I will tell you that I am determined to finish this fic, so if you're willing to stick it out, please accompany me to the end.


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